Muscovites were very frightened on Thursday after a large-scale failure to pay for tickets in public transport, including the metro and bus network, reports The Moscow Times.

Payment by phone in public transport in MoscowPhoto: Mykhailo Tereshchenko / TASS / Profimedia

Passengers who pay for trips with bank cards have started to have problems, the RBC website reports with reference to the press service of VTB Bank, which is responsible for conducting these operations, News.ro cites.

According to Muscovites, when they tried to pay with a card, they received a message about the lack of funds, despite the fact that there was money in their accounts. At the same time, funds were actually withdrawn from the cards, but the turnstiles of the metro remained blocked.

As noted by “Vedomosti”, the technical problem affected the cards of the largest banks: payment by cards issued by Sber, Raiffeisenbank and Tinkoff did not work.

Two days ago, there was a serious failure in the work of the Russian Internet network

The breakdown in Moscow’s public transport occurred two days after the “power cut” in Russia’s own Internet network Runet, which affected millions of users in Russia and abroad and became almost the largest in the history of the “.ru” domain.

During the incident, which lasted several hours and which the authorities attributed to a software flaw, Roskomnadzor (the communications watchdog agency) ordered the release of a key element of the “sovereign network” – the national domain name system. The communication operators received the relevant order from the Center for monitoring and management of the public communication network. At the same time, an order was given to disable the DNSSEC protocol – cryptographic protection for authentication in the domain name system (DNS).

The incident in Runet, which left Russians without access to sites in the “.ru” domain, could be connected to a test of switching to national DNS servers, the official said. This idea was repeatedly expressed at the state level, he recalled. The directive to create Russia’s own DNS system independent of the West – a de facto “separate Internet” – was given by President Vladimir Putin back in 2017.

The failure in Runet occurred due to an error in updating the DNSSEC keys for the “.ru” domain, and the replacement of the key for the DNSSEC signature could be related to the transition to the national DNS.

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