Usually packed with video content, RuTube's site is
currently black, with a short message reading: "Attention! The site is
undergoing technical work. The site was attacked. At the moment the situation
is under control. User data has been saved."
The attack began on Monday, a major national holiday when
Russia commemorated the Soviet victory over Adolf Hitler and President Vladimir
Putin delivered a speech likening that struggle to the current war in Ukraine.
"Someone really wanted to prevent RuTube from showing
the Victory Day parade and celebratory fireworks," RuTube said. "It
is not a sin to remember the battles our guys won. The battle for RuTube
continues."
It described the cyberattack as the worst in the site's
history.
In a separate incident on Monday, Russian satellite
television menus were hacked to show viewers in Moscow messages about events in
Ukraine, including "You have blood on your hands", according to
screenshots obtained by Reuters.
The websites of state-owned companies and news websites have
fallen under sporadic hacking efforts since Russia invaded Ukraine on February
24, often to show information that is at odds with Moscow's official line on
what it calls a "special military operation".
RuTube said a large team was working to restore the service,
and denied reports it had lost the website's source code.
The long outage goes some way to explaining why Russia has
not yet blocked Alphabet's YouTube, despite repeatedly fining and warning the
US service over its removal of some state-backed Russian channels and for
failing to delete content Moscow deems illegal.
Russia restricted access to Twitter and Meta Platform's
Facebook and Instagram in early March.
Critics have previously told Reuters that RuTube, despite
its weekly user numbers jumping in early March as other foreign social media
were forced out of the Russian market, still has a long way to go to rival
Google's video product. © Reuters