The Central Bank’s payments system collapsed after Roskomnadzor’s blocking intensified.
The wave of Runet failures that Russia faced in the first months of 2025 amid increased blocking by Roskomnadzor has reached the Central Bank’s Quick Payment System.Launched in 2019, the SBP, which allows you to instantly transfer money by phone number, as well as pay for goods and services by QR code, experienced a large-scale “blackout” on the morning of Wednesday, March 26.
According to the data of Downdetector and Failure.rf services, the users faced the impossibility to transfer money and replenish their accounts. The failure affected almost all major Russian banks, as well as applications of Sber, VTB, Alfa Bank, T-Bank, and Ozon Bank. The service “Yandex Pay” stopped working, users also complained about problems with the mobile operator “Megafon”. Roskomnadzor specified that the failure occurred on the infrastructure of the National Payment Card System – a 100% subsidiary of the Central Bank, which manages the payment card system “Mir” and is the operator of bank transfers throughout Russia.The failure, which lasted about an hour, was the third in Russia over the past week.
On March 24, users complained about malfunctions in the online applications of Sberbank, Rosselkhozbank, gaming platforms Steam, FaceIt and Epic Games Store (EGS), as well as a number of telecom operators MTS, Bilain, Megafon and the largest Internet provider Rostelecom. In addition, users of the Wildberries marketplace, Instagram, the Okko online movie theater and the TikTok video platform reported the failure.
Four days earlier, residents of Siberia, the Urals and Primorye faced a lack of Internet access and malfunctions in online services. At the time, Roskomnadzor attributed the malfunctions to “the use of foreign server infrastructure, which is where the failures are recorded”. At the same time, profile forums reported about the blocking of Cloudfare, a popular American service that provides protection against DDoS attacks, CDN and DNS server services, as well as Amazon and Fastly services.
Before that, Roskomnadzor urged Russian companies to refuse to use Cloudfare, as it includes TLS ECH technology, which allows bypassing access restrictions to resources banned in Russia. At the same time, the service was used by those sites that are at risk of hacker attacks, experts said. After the failure on March 20, Roskomandzor announced its intention to conduct a study of the dependence of Russian services on foreign infrastructure for the sake of “improving security and sustainability.”
In total, five large-scale disruptions of the Internet have occurred in Russia since the beginning of the year. Such incidents became more frequent after Roskomnadzor conducted an exercise in early December to test the security and stability of the Runet. The agency noted that the purpose of the exercise, which is held annually in accordance with the law on the “sovereign Runet,” is to confirm the “readiness” of the Russian segment of the Internet to work without connections to the outside world. In particular, it checks “the availability of key foreign and Russian services in case of a deliberate external impact,” Roskomnadzor said.