Social media users in Uzbekistan on Wednesday complained about YouTube slowing down. Several Gazeta.uz journalists also noted that some videos were loading slower than usual.
Some users linked the problem with the slowing down of the YouTube in Russia. Uzbekistan buys internet channels from several countries, including Russia.
The Ministry of digital technologies in a comment to Gazeta.uz said the video hosting platform was working as usual and was not being slowed down.
The ministry spokesperson Sherzod Ahmatov stressed that slowing down the YouTube would not in any way affect its speed in Uzbekistan.
“If YouTube slows down in one country, this would not affect Uzbekistan even if the backbone network is switched off. The same can be said about other online services. The country is not tied to one certain state, it buys the internet from several states,” he clarified.
Sherzod Ahmatov added that Google, which owns YouTube, has caching servers in various countries, including Uzbekistan.
On 26 July, head of the Russian State Duma’s information policy committee Alexander Khinshtein said the speed of YouTube in the country slowed down by 40% because the company did not take proper actions.
He said that about 80% of the main video content consumed in Russia is stored on Google servers within Russia. These servers need constant maintenance and support, which the company cannot provide because of sanctions.
The deputy added that Russian data centers cooperating with Google were planning to stop working with the US company using “grey schemes”. This will lead to additional slowing down of the YouTube — by up to 70%, he said.
