Reg.ru outage knocks out part of Russian internet — power substation on Vavilova Street failed

On August 18, 2026, a major outage hit Reg.ru, a major Russian hosting provider and domain registrar. The disruption affected not only the company's main website and user account dashboard, but also numerous websites whose domains are delegated through Reg.ru's infrastructure. Many online resources became inaccessible or operated intermittently, with DNS server problems suspected as the root cause.

The preliminary reason for the failure is an incident at an electrical substation on Vavilova Street in Moscow. A power outage at the MMTS-9 interconnection point — the oldest and largest internet exchange point in Russia — knocked out part of the data center equipment. The failure of one critical infrastructure node triggered a cascading effect: other nodes that handle network traffic began to fail in sequence, causing widespread disruptions across multiple services simultaneously.

MMTS-9, also known as the Moscow Internet Exchange, is a key hub for Russian internet traffic, and its stability is crucial for many local providers and services. The power loss at the substation effectively cut off electricity to some of the exchange's core equipment, leading to the cascading failure.

As of the time of reporting, no exact timeline for full recovery of all affected services has been announced. Reg.ru's technical teams are working to restore normal operation, but the scale of the incident — involving both power infrastructure and network equipment — suggests that it may take significant time to bring everything back online. The event highlights the vulnerability of critical internet infrastructure to localized power grid failures, especially when a single point of failure like a major exchange node can amplify the impact across dozens of dependent services.