Hackers claim to have caused Russian websites broadcasting Vladimir Putin's annual address to go offline

• Online broadcasts of Vladimir Putin's annual speech were interrupted on Tuesday.
• State media websites broadcasting the website went offline at various periods, per reports.

Online broadcasts of President Vladimir Putin's annual speech were interrupted on Tuesday after an apparent cyberattack, according to reports.

Reuters reported that journalists in several locations were unable to access the websites associated with the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VG TRK), a state broadcaster, during Putin's address to the federal assembly.

Smotrim.ru, a live-streaming platform that broadcasts the state-run Rossiya-24 channel, also went offline at points, according to Reuters.

(Both websites appear to now be back online.)

Tass, a Russian state-owned news agency, confirmed in a post that broadcasting of the speech was interrupted on those websites, noting that an error message saying "technical work is underway" was displayed instead.

Russia's state-run RIA Novosti news agency, meanwhile, said disruptions to the broadcast were the result of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This is when a series of bots flood a website or service with HTTP requests and traffic in a bid to shut down a network and make it inaccessible to its intended users.

Insider was unable to independently verify the cause of the outages.

Though it is not clear who or what was behind the outages, at least one pro-Ukraine hacking group has claimed responsibility.

IT Army of Ukraine, a volunteer cyberwarfare organization created shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, said in a tweet: "We launched a DDoS attack on channels showing Putin's address to the federal assembly: 1TV, VGTRK and SMOTRIM," the group said in a tweet. "Slava Ukraini."

Newsweek reported that another hacking group claiming to work on behalf of Russian opposition activist Alexey Navalny also claimed responsibility, saying it caused the disruption along with "other hackers."

During the two-hour address, which came just before the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Putin railed against the West and said that Russia was ready to resume nuclear weapons testing.