A Moscow fire exposes the Russian internet’s single point of failure

On 18 August 2026, a fire at a Moscow power plant cut electricity to MMTS-9, the building that hosts the core of MSK-IX, Russia’s main internet exchange point; Discord, Steam, Telegram and the country’s mobile carriers went down with it. The incident confirms a twenty-one-year-old warning: concentrating interconnection in one place is fragile design.