Russia was hit with a widespread internet outage across the country. Internet users across the country and abroad were unable to access sites with the .ru domain for hours on Tuesday evening, with the outage affecting hundreds of mobile applications and websites. The outage was reportedly the largest in recent history.

Websites including Yandex, Sberbank and Ozon were affected. Banking applications, including Sberbank, were not functioning. Failures were also noted in the operation of mobile operators.

Russia's Digital Development Ministry said on Wednesday the outage had been fixed, and that it was caused by technical problems with its Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), which strengthens authentication in the Domain Name System using digital signatures based on public key cryptography. Read more about this story on our LinkedIn page