On Monday, Russian users found they could no longer reach PyPI, the package repository that Python developers rely on for code libraries.
Reports began appearing on the Detector404 website after 1:00 p.m., Moscow time, on June 1. A Habr user named freehabr was among the first to flag the issue; by evening, the volume of complaints had tapered off.
According to freehabr, the access problems hit both end users and hosted servers alike. Commenters confirmed they had run into the same issues.
Access problems with the repository affect everyone who writes Python code, because PyPI is the core infrastructure underlying the language, according to Kod Durova, a Russian tech news outlet.
The outlet reported that its own diagnostics showed the site behaving like resources blocked by Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal media regulator:
A check using a tool for diagnosing internet blocks showed that the connection to pypi.org drops at the TLS stage — the encryption protocol that establishes a secure channel between a client and a server. This behavior is characteristic of resources blocked by Roskomnadzor via DPI (deep packet inspection).
Roskomnadzor told the Russian business daily Vedomosti that it had not restricted access to PyPI and was not aware of any problems with access to the site.
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