No problem, Google
Since the beginning of June, owners of Android smartphones and users of popular Google services, including YouTube, have noticed a deterioration in connection quality. For example, comments on YouTube take about a minute to load and images are not displayed correctly in the search engine.
on the Peekaboo forum branch “Google and YouTube are slowly starting to work in Russia. There is a way to fix this,” users wrote in more than 1,000 comments, mostly complaining of broken services.
“I think a lot of people have noticed that not only YouTube and Chrome but also other Google services become problematic. Femeli link pops up over time. Google driver often sometimes does not see the network or disconnects. However, the inability to access the purchased content from the market library is even a bit is insulting. And the most offensive vpn will not help here in any way, ”said user KioSoffi [здесь и далее орфография и пунктуация авторов соблюдены].
“So, isn’t it just me that Google maps hasn’t been working for the past five days?” asked Xahdr.
User TovarishchMajor wrote: “Does Google Assistant work well for everyone? Yesterday I wanted to use it to set a reminder but got the error “No connection to Google”. In what he normally volunteers, but does not take any action. To her disappointment, she even made Alice the default assistant.
The socialbites.ca reporter also made sure that all the Google services he’s been using for the past few days are running at very slow speeds, and some apps don’t “see” the Internet connection at all.
According to the material of the DTF portal, Google corruption may be related With Google Global Cache (GGC) disabled.
On May 26, it was learned that the tech giant informed Russian providers about the termination of service contracts for GGC servers, which are used to accelerate the loading of Google services.
Then, in an interview with Rostelecom representative RBC declaration, the company did not observe the outages of Google servers, and the MTS representative also said that “traffic is being delivered from Google’s sources in normal mode.” No changes were noticed in the work on MegaFon either. The press services of Russian mobile operators responded to socialbites.ca’s current request, as RBC did two weeks ago.
Denis Kuskov, CEO of the analytical agency TelecomDaily, said in an interview with socialbites.ca that he attributed the deterioration in the work of Google services to the shutdown of GGC in Russia.
“Google Global Cache made it possible to download content not from foreigners, but from servers located in Russia. Now this is not the case, and of course this greatly affects the speed and increase in data transfer volume, ”said the director.
At the same time, the expert added that “it’s worse than now”, that the company’s services will no longer work – the only disruption is the theoretical shutdown of YouTube and other Google products.
In turn, Eldar Murtazin, principal analyst of the Mobile Research Group, in an interview with socialbites.ca expressed the opinion that Global Cache has nothing to do with it – it associates the malfunctioning Google services with Roskomnadzor blocking.
“This isn’t about shutting down GGC servers, it’s about Roskomnadzor’s actions blocking certain subnets and IP addresses. Today, blocking on behalf of RKN is carried out on a very wide scale. All these blocks actually break services, not just Google. This already happened a year ago. Google is reconfiguring everything to get rid of these locks. There was a struggle with VPN services, and in the process, they broke everything that wasn’t covered by the block, at least officially. Based on this, we can say that the story is ambiguous to say the least.”
At the same time, on 31 May at the supervisory authority declarationNot taking restrictive measures against YouTube. At the time of this writing, socialbites.ca received a response from the press service of Roskomnadzor, stating that the problems in the operation of Google products have nothing to do with previously blocked VPN services.
“Measures to limit the operation of VPN services that violate Russian law on the territory of the Russian Federation do not affect the availability or speed of other Internet resources,” the representative of the RKN said.
Meanwhile, Karen Kazaryan, principal analyst of RAEC (Russian Electronic Communications Association), suggested that a noticeable decrease in the quality of the connection with Google was due to the blocking of the “Main Radio Frequency Center” (GRFC) affiliated with Roskomnadzor.
“Most likely this is due to the GRFC being blocked in the TSPU (technical tools against threats). We do not know exactly what was blocked, because this is confidential information. Probably parts of Google’s infrastructure, including the CDN,” Kazarian said.
Also, according to the expert, GGC still continues to work on the territory of Russia, which means that the decrease in download speed cannot be attributed to this platform.
GRCHTS did not respond to socialbites.ca’s request at the time the article was published.
What shall we do?
Netizens in the comments on forums and posts about problems with Google services create their own version of what happened. So, for example, the most common opinion is to turn off the QUIC protocol in Russia. The only instruction that helps to restore the previous state of web versions of Google services is about disabling this particular protocol.
For the full work of the search engine, maps and YouTube, you need to open a browser on a PC or smartphone and type “chrome: // flags” in the address bar. In the window that opens, you need to type “QUIC” and set “Experimental QUIC protocol” to “Disabled” and restart the browser.
After completing this procedure, some users received Google services that work properly and quickly in the Chrome browser, Yandex.Browser and other Internet browsers built on the Chromium engine. However, there are those for whom this solution does not help.
“Does not work, routes on maps do not work, assistant does not work, Google profile is the same” author smykka in the related “Peekaboo” thread.
But even if the browser accelerates Google services, this will not solve all the problems – on smartphones, the Google Play digital store, YouTube and other applications will work at very low speed, regardless of whether the user is connected to the mobile Internet or Wi-Fi. Fi network. At the same time, some services do not work at all. For example, when searching with images in Google Lens, the user receives an error asking him to check the network connection. A similar problem is faced by Google Assistant users. The only way to “bring” Google services back to full life at the moment is to connect to the Internet using VPN services.