Tracking shifts in Internet connectivity in Kherson, Ukraine

On April 30, 2022, an internet outage occurred in the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, south Ukraine, lasting until May 4. This was the most significant disruption to internet traffic in Kherson since the start of the war. The reasons for the lack of communication were interruptions of fiber-optic trunk lines and disconnection from the power supply of equipment of operators in the region. During this time, Ukrainian Internet users were connected to the Russian network by switching fiber-optic lines and communication stations. This is a gross violation of international law, as explained by Yuriy Shchyhol, head of the organization. The routing path for Khersontelecom showed a shift from several other Ukrainian network providers to a Russian network, AS201776 (Miranda), which also includes AS12389 (Rostelecom). This change impacted data center selection and requests were sent to Cloudflare's Moscow data center. However, traffic started being handled again by the Kyiv and Frankfurt data centers around 06:00 UTC on May 4, as the routing path for AS47598 no longer had Russian networks as upstream providers but instead returned to reaching the Internet through other Ukrainian networks.