Before the three-week shutdown of the mobile Internet in Moscow, telecom operators received a list of base stations to which access was limited from the FSB Scientific and Technical Service (), The Bell newspaper wrote, citing sources in the telecom market and the government.
According to one official, the outages were “dropped from above.” He says the government knows nothing about the reasons, but the rationale was to counter threats, not to test “whitelists” (this version was expressed by an RBC source in early March).
Another interlocutor says that the FSB “received a certain map from NTS, indicating where the Internet should be turned off.” According to him, “the security forces hinted in every possible way that this was not their decision – they were given it too.” An interviewer for The Bell saw the card in question from a major operator. It is not known whether they were synchronized with cards held by other operators.
As follows from this map, the closures affected almost the entire center of Moscow up to the Garden Ring and several areas from the Garden Ring to the Third Ring Road in the north, east and south. In addition, the Internet was cut off near the Southern Port, sewage treatment plants in Pechatniki, in the southwest of Losiny Ostrov Park and in the Spercity construction zone near Krasnogorsk. It is not clear on what basis the areas were chosen.
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Mobile Internet problems in Moscow began on March 5. In many areas of the center there was none at all; In some places it could appear briefly, but then disappear again, and sometimes there was no cellular connection. The RBC source claimed that in this way they are testing the “white list” of resources that should be available even during a service outage. On the afternoon of March 24, mobile Internet in central Moscow started working again. Throughout the 19 days, the authorities did not explain in any way why the internet was shut down.