Russian state TV website goes down during Putin speech

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian state media websites broadcasting President Vladimir Putin’s address to the country’s two houses of parliaments on Tuesday suffered an outage during his speech.

Reuters journalists in multiple locations were 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.

A message on the VGTRK website said that “technical works were being carried out” while the Smotrim website was not loading.

Shortly before the speech started, state TV channels had broadcast a segment on the technical preparations that go into broadcasting the speech, saying the live stream would be carried across all major Russian TV channels.

The state-run RIA Novosti news agency said the outage was the result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the reason for the outages.

(Reporting by Reuters)