In the morning, many people were already stressed: for some users, links stopped working on Telegram. Before everyone could catch their breath, a new problem arrived. Some users in Russia complained about access issues with Google and GitHub. The sites simply won’t open when accessed from a Russian IP address.
Three sites went down to rest, but the reason is unclear
Why GitHub and Google Are Not Working in Russia
According to the monitoring service Detector404, the outages began around 10:00 AM Moscow time. In just one hour, users filed more than 650 complaints about Google and more than 350 complaints about GitHub. These are significant numbers for such a niche topic — problems with these sites are usually isolated.
Many complaints about GitHub
The majority of reports came from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and Chelyabinsk regions. Detector404 also recorded network interruptions: HTTPS connections to GitHub were dropping in roughly half of all cases, while Google connections failed 26% of the time. People unanimously noted one detail: the sites are only inaccessible from Russian IPs. As soon as you connect through a foreign address, everything loads as if nothing happened. Meanwhile, Roskomnadzor has not officially announced blocking these services.
Google is affected too
Let’s also remind you what we’re talking about. GitHub is the largest code hosting platform, home to millions of projects — from student assignments to the core of popular software. For developers, it’s an everyday working tool, so they notice any disruptions immediately. Google needs no introduction, but for many people it’s also email, documents, and maps, without which the day grinds to a halt.
Apple won’t open either
Testing Google, GitHub, and the Apple Website from a Russian IP
The AppleInsider.ru editorial team didn’t just take people’s word for it and tested the situation ourselves on multiple devices and in different cities. The picture turned out to be interesting and not as clear-cut as the complaints suggested.
GitHub indeed only opened for us with a foreign IP address. From a Russian address, the site either hung endlessly loading or immediately returned a connection error. Cloning repositories didn’t work either. However, we had no issues with Google: search, email, maps, and other services worked normally on all devices and for everyone we asked to check.
GitHub and Apple won’t open at all, but Google started working
We also tested apple.com, and here a surprise was waiting. The official Apple website didn’t open from a Russian address: the page either hung loading or returned a connection error. At the same time, all other Apple services worked as if nothing happened — from App Store to iCloud and syncing. So the problem is specifically with the website itself, not the ecosystem.
Importantly, we reproduced the effect multiple times in a row and on different carriers. So it’s not about one faulty provider or a dead router — the pattern is consistent.
The conclusion is simple. GitHub and apple.com have a more serious problem, while Google complaints are most likely isolated and depend on the specific provider and region. If your search isn’t loading but your neighbor’s works fine, that’s normal for the current situation. Overall, this looks much more like an outage than a deliberate block, so there’s no need to panic prematurely.
Why GitHub Has Been Working Poorly in Russia
Problems with GitHub in Russia have been dragging on for more than a month. According to independent monitoring by OONI, since May 2026 the share of anomalous connections to the platform has risen to approximately 16%. So the site has been shaky for a while — it just became especially noticeable to a wider audience today.
There’s also a purely technical theory. On July 14, GitHub conducted a scheduled check with a temporary shutdown of outdated SHA-1 encryption. Such a procedure could easily add difficulties for those with an old browser or system. So some of the outages may have nothing to do with blocking at all and could simply be routine maintenance. It’s better not to rush to conclusions here — there are already plenty of rumors around the topic.
In the spring, users in Kazakhstan faced similar difficulties, so the trend isn’t exactly new. At that time, GitHub itself explained a couple of incidents as technical maintenance. Now, experts are cautiously talking about a platform reliability crisis: the cloud infrastructure is periodically experiencing storms, and Russia feels it particularly painfully.
Officially, Roskomnadzor has not restricted access to GitHub. However, dozens of individual pages of the service are already listed in the registry of prohibited resources, and their number has grown noticeably since the beginning of the year. This, understandably, doesn’t reassure users.
