Twitch is reportedly blocked in Russia after the country’s state communications regulator announced it was blocking specific IP addresses owned by Amazon and Google.
Twitch was one of the companies hit by the block, according to testimonies on Reddit and Twitter, although YouTube remained active. One Twitch affiliate streamer, who goes by Angry Roleplayer, posted an update on Reddit earlier today, noting that more than 20 million IP’s and IP gates were banned.
Yesterday Russian authorities started blocking Telegram (popular encrypted messenger) and Amazon (and Google) server ip’s country-wide. As a result over 20 MILLION ip’s and ip gates were banned which resulted in massive nation-wide blocking and collapse of many services that used amazon and some google-based servers. Unfortunately twitch is also BLOCKED NOW for most Russians including me! So i had to use VPN and TOR to write a message on actual twitch website. I have literally no idea how i can stream with twitch in this situation. And i am a full-time, twitch affiliated streamer and i just get 2000: Network Error now.
Other streamers and organizations in Russia who rely on Twitch, like Team Empire, tweeted out their own streaming problems stemming from the IP ban.
there can be pauses\issues during todays games because of it
— Team Empire (@team_empire) April 17, 2018
The block comes as a result of the Russian watchdog group Roskomnadzor’s ongoing attempts to block citizens from using Telegram, an encrypted messaging service. Roskomnadzor has grown uneasy with the encrypted tool, claiming that people are using the service for nefarious purposes, and is trying to shut it down after the company “refused to comply with a court order to grant state security services access to its users’ encrypted messages,” according to Reuters. Reuters also reported that Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, thanked companies like Apple, Google and Amazon on his personal Telegram channel for “for not taking part in political censorship.”
“We have currently informed both companies that a significant number of IP addresses located in the clouds of these two services have fallen under the block on the basis of the court ruling (to block Telegram),” Alexander Zharov, head of the Roskomnadzor, was reported as saying by Reuters.
Twitch seems to be one of the Amazon-owned IP addresses that was hit by the outage. People on Twitter expressed their frustration over the current situation, asking for tips on VPN servers they could possibly use to reroute their stream.
“You didn’t hear about it, but Russian government is currently trying to block half of the Internet in Russia (literally millions of IPs in Amazon and Google subnets),” one person on Twitter said. “So... Twitch already has stopped working on one of my ISP connections. Any advices on good VPN for streaming?”
Angry Roleplayer uploaded a video to YouTube, a Google-owned IP address that apparently wasn’t hit by the block, discussing the issue. He also displayed the message that appeared on his Twitch account while trying to access it to stream.
Although other people in Angry Roleplayer’s Reddit thread confirmed they were seeing similar outages because of the block, at least one other person who reportedly lives in Moscow said Twitch was operating just fine.
“It works fine for me,” they wrote. “Yesterday I was streaming hours without any problems.”
Polygon has reached out for more information from Twitch on the situation.