Russian state media websites that broadcast Vladimir Putin’s crucial speech to the Russian parliament on the one-year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine went down during the speech.

Reuters reporters in various locations were unable to access the website of the All-Russian State Broadcasting Corporation (VGTRK) or the live-streaming platform Smotrim for parts of the speech.

A message on the VGTRK website stated that “technical work is in progress”, while the Smotrim website would not load.

A few hours before the start of the speech, state television networks broadcast footage of the technical preparations for the live broadcast with the information that the live stream will go to all major Russian television networks.

The state-run RIA Novosti agency reported that the outage is the result of a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, a type of cyberattack carried out by deliberately overloading the network with a huge volume of connections that causes the server to stop or crash.

Reuters was unable to confirm the reason for the outage.