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YouTube stops playing videos in almost all web browsers in Russia

High quality videos are still being played in the Yandex browser and in the Safari desktop version

© Dmitry Feoktistov/TASS

MOSCOW, August 3. /TASS/. The US video sharing platform YouTube has stopped playing high quality videos in almost all desktop browsers in Russia, a TASS correspondent has found out.

In particular, high quality videos are not being played in Google Chrome, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Mi Browser (Xiaomi’s web browser for Android phones). The Safari browser for mobile devices takes the user to the YouTube app.

High quality videos are still being played in the Yandex browser and in the Safari desktop version.

The YouTube outage, which began on August 1, has affected its users on iOS and Android. YouTube is facing glitches in web browsers, as users cannot watch videos.

Earlier, Russian telecommunications operator Rostelecom informed about technical issues in the operation of equipment owned by Google and used on an operator’s network infrastructure, as well as in traffic exchange between telecom operators, which may affect the YouTube traffic in Russia.

YouTube was cautioned about potential technical issues with traffic speed on July 12, Rostelecom said, adding that Google (owner of the YouTube video sharing platform) was to be blamed for technical problems, as in 2022 the tech giant had washed its hands of expanding and renovating its equipment in Russia, which is used for backing up the Google Global Cache server (GGC, which facilitates user access to Google services).

In March 2022, YouTube disabled the Premium subscription option for Russians. After the start of Russia's special operation in Ukraine, the video giant suspended monetization for content creators from Russia, while Google switched off contextual advertising for Russian residents from the search engine and video hosting.

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