Microsoft Appears To Be Blocking Windows 11 And 10 Downloads In Russia

Shortly after Russia started its invasion of Ukraine, many tech corporations introduced that they might be suspending gross sales to the nation. Among the businesses that made these bulletins have been AMD, Intel, TSMC, NVIDIA, Apple, Cisco, Oracle, IBM, PlayStation, Nintendo, and Microsoft. Since this preliminary flurry of bulletins, numerous corporations have continued to impose stricter limitations on Russia. While unannounced, evidently Microsoft additional tightened its restrictions on Russia over the weekend.

On Sunday, TASS, the biggest state-owned Russian information company, revealed a discover to Telegram saying that “Attempts to install Windows 11 and Windows 10 from Microsoft’s website end with an error” (translated by DeepL). The Telegram message additionally notes that the download completes with out subject whereas linked to a VPN.

We have been in a position to verify this discovering by connecting to a VPN server situated in Russia and trying to download Windows from the Microsoft web site. Not solely have been we unable to download Windows 10 and 11 installers, we have been additionally unable to Windows 8.1, Windows 10 IoT Core, and the Media Feature Pack for Windows 10. Once we switched again to a US-based IP tackle, we had no downside downloading these installers, even whereas utilizing the Russian-language model of the web site.

While linked to the Russian VPN server, clicking the download button for the Windows 11 Installation Assistant redirected us to a download web page that displayed a 404 error. We have been in a position to download the Windows 11 set up media instrument, however, the instrument throws an error with the code 0x80072F8F-0x20000 when run. The error dialog says in Russian, “For some unknown reason, this tool failed to run on your computer.” All different download choices displayed the error proven within the picture above.

Microsoft has but to make a press release confirming that this conduct is intentional, so we’ll need to see whether or not the corporate is purposefully blocking Russian customers from downloading Windows set up instruments. Ironically, whereas evidently Russians can hook up with a VPN server situated exterior of Russia to get round this restriction, the federal government has banned the usage of fifteen totally different VPN providers to be able to stop residents from connecting to the web with out going by way of the Federal Government Information System.