Russian state media websites experienced an outage during President Vladimir Putin's address to the country's two houses of parliaments on Tuesday. This left journalists in multiple locations unable to access the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) website or the Smotrim live-streaming platform for periods during the speech.
At the start of the broadcast, state TV channels had even aired a segment on the technical preparations that were being made for the speech, stating that the live stream would be carried across all major Russian TV channels. However, things took a sudden turn for the worse when both the VGTRK and Smotrim websites went down.
A message on the VGTRK website stated that "technical works were being carried out," while the Smotrim website was not loading at all. The state-run RIA Novosti news agency later reported that the outage was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
In a lengthy address on Tuesday morning, Mr. Putin pledged to continue the fight in Ukraine, which has lasted for a year and accused Nato of fueling the flames by erroneously assuming that Russia would be defeated.
