Twitch is being blocked in Russia - reports

Twitch has seemingly been inadvertently blocked in Russia as a result of a nation-wide crackdown on IPs owned by Amazon, and Google.

Over the past 24 hours, reports that Twitch is being blocked in Russia have been popping up online from several Twitch streamers and viewers in Russia. Sometimes the outage affects video, other times only the chat.

It's been up and down, it seems, and many players and viewers and Russia are frustrated. This all started when Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, refused to allow Russian security authorities access to user data and messages.

Telegram relies on Amazon and Google's cloud services, and so Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor decided to bulk ban a significant number of IP addresses and IP gates owned by the two companies. This not only hit local websites and services that rely on Google and Amazon's servers, it seemingly also caught Twitch in the crossfire.

Twitch is owned by Amazon, but it doesn't look like Russian authorities intended to ban the platform specifically. YouTube, per reports on social media, appears to work fine.

At the time of writing, many still report being unable to access Twitch in Russia, and it's not clear if Russian authorities will exclude Twitch from the ban moving forward, or if the IP ban itself is temporary.

"Unfortunately twitch is also BLOCKED NOW [emphasis his] for most Russians including me! So i had to use VPN and TOR to write a message on actual twitch website," lamented Angry_Roleplayer.