What happened
On the evening of August 18, a fire and power disruption in southwestern Moscow triggered outages across large parts of the Russian internet. Witnesses reported a fire near Vavilova Street, with one account describing an explosion at a power substation, and blackouts hit several central Moscow districts. The critical damage was not to any single website but to power feeding the MMTS-9 facility, better known as M9, a telecom hub that industry monitors describe as housing the country's key network infrastructure and the core of the MSK-IX internet exchange, where dozens of operators interconnect. When M9 lost power, internet providers including Rostelecom and Lovit, mobile operators MegaFon and Beeline, and services such as Telegram, Discord, and Steam dropped for users far beyond Moscow. Local reports indicated power was restored within roughly an hour and services gradually recovered, but for that window, a single building's power problem effectively degraded a national internet.
Why it matters for your business
This is a textbook single point of failure, and the lesson travels well beyond Russia. Most small businesses in the DMV depend on a chain of infrastructure they have never mapped: one ISP, one office router, one cloud region, one payment processor. The M9 incident shows how quickly things fail when a shared chokepoint goes down, and it is the same pattern behind past outages at major US cloud and CDN providers. You cannot prevent an upstream failure, but you can decide in advance whether it stops your business cold or just slows it down.
What to do about it
- Write down what your business needs to operate for one day: internet, phones, card payments, key apps
- Add a backup path for the most critical item, such as a 5G failover hotspot for card processing
- Confirm whether your phone system and website live with different providers than your office internet
- Run a 30-minute tabletop drill: if the internet died at 10 a.m. tomorrow, what would each employee do?