Vkontakte, Russia's second most visited website after Yandex and country's largest social network, with 280 million accounts worldwide, was down in Russia for more than an hour on Jan. 24, before slowly being restored.
Over 74,000 tweets with the hashtag #вкнелагай (vk don’t break) reached top spot in the Twitter’s trending tweets within less than an hour on Jan. 24, 2015.
The so-called “hashtag storm” started started around 8:40 p.m. Within 10 minutes it scaled more than 20,000 tweets.
Before that #Mariupol and #WorldwakeupRussiainvadedUkraine hashtags were created to gain attention to the pro-Russian rebels’ attacks in Mariupol today with 29 killed and 102 wounded. They had top spots with over 90,000 and 50,000 tweets respectively. However, the frequency of posting tweets about Russian social network beat the Ukrainian ones.
The head of public relations at Vkontakte, Georgii Lobushkin, posted on his Twitter “Vkontakte is blocked. Currently we are doing our best to find out, why this happened. Stay tuned.”
Although the website has recovered, there is still no explanation from Vkontakte’s spokeperson on the reason of the breakdown.
Previously, Russian soldiers who fight against the Ukrainian army in the Donbas were posting pictures of them with the guns on Vkontakte leading to a public outrage.
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.
