Roskomnadzor Reports No Change In YouTube’s Quality In Russia

Posted by By Dan Taylor 2 Min Read

Roskomnadzor has confirmed that there are no changes in the quality of YouTube’s service in Russia. The Center for Monitoring and Control of the Public Communications Network (CMU CCCN) made this announcement following claims that YouTube had become more accessible via major mobile operators.

These claims were tied to data from the GlobalCheck block monitoring website, which tracks the availability of IP addresses and websites. However, GlobalCheck does not assess the quality of services, such as video streaming.

Current State of YouTube’s Service

The CMU CCCN stated on its website that there have been no improvements in YouTube’s performance. Users continue to experience slowdowns, a problem that has persisted for months.

Yandex also corroborated this, stating that as of 14:00, it had not observed any changes in the operation of YouTube through its Video Search service. In the past 24 hours, slow video loading has been reported 10% more often, potentially due to an increase in users testing the platform’s performance.

Yandex’s Role in Improving Viewing Experience

Yandex indexes over six billion videos globally and uses tools like its slow video loading detector to help users bypass performance issues. When slowdowns are detected, users are advised to switch to alternative sources or platforms. They can also filter out sites with persistent loading problems from their search results.

Background

This summer, Russian users experienced noticeable slowdowns while using YouTube. Despite recent speculation, Roskomnadzor and Yandex confirm that these issues remain unchanged, and no improvements have been recorded.

Source: CMU SSOP

Dan Taylor
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Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor