People from Moscow are reporting that the disruptions are worse if you live near an infrastructure node, such as the central railway station where they have to move away to get some coverage. People who kept their landline are happy to be able to use it for com. The most obvious reason is to prevent drones to be able to use the networks for possible attacks. Many with friends and family outside were happily communicating out until recently, with VPN or not, but it is now impacting more and more people, outsiders with elderly parents for example have difficulties having them find a way to go through the restrictions, reality is slowly catching up.

Old hardware at inflated price, subscription that is not adapted, I have an Xbox One and I have been on Game Pass and Live Gold for as long as I remember, had a 360 and an Original before that, and was finally looking to upgrade to a Series after using Xbox Cloud for new titles, but the recent price hike makes me reconsider. I was first looking at second hand, but with the new Game Pass prices, I am not even sure, I stopped it and this month I finally bought Minecraft for the kids instead of the Game Pass version they have been using for years (they also have it Switch) and was pretty pissed to be reminded that basic multiplayer still requires the base subscription, that is still expensive for what it is, especially when free to play Fortnite, even on Xbox, doesn't require any. I already have Prime's Luna Standard, and Steam and GOG games, the future Xbox might be nice for my usage, but maybe not for Game Pass and not if it is overpriced, and if not maybe Valve's hardware or even going back to custom build PC will be the way. Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot.