Tech Giants Sanctions Against Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

Last month when Russia started invading Ukraine, several European countries responded against the invasion by imposing sanctions on Russia, affecting several Russian industries including Oil processing. But it was not over yet, soon tech giants including Twitter, Google, and Facebook paused advertisements and other services till the conflict ends.

Last week Reddit quarantined r/Russia and r/RussiaPolitics for spreading misinformation in the subreddit. After quarantining the subreddit, Reddit suggestion system stopped suggesting it resulting in lowering the particular subreddit’s discovery across the Reddit platform.

Twitter also halted its advertisement system in Russia and Ukraine to prevent misinformation from spreading. As a result, Twitter and Facebook, both were restricted across Russia.

Apple and Microsoft stops sales in Russia

Now a big step has been taken by Apple and Microsoft. Apple has stopped sales of its products across Russia and paused its online transactions, including limiting Apple Pay in Russia. It also disabled some Apple Maps features in Ukraine to protect its citizens.

Microsoft has stopped sales of all of its products and services in Russia, at the same time pledged to improve its cybersecurity in Ukraine.

Google on the other hand, has suspended its entire advertising in Russia. Last week, Google demonetized all Russian state-owned media, stopping them making money from ads showing on their apps, websites, and YouTube videos.

Wordfence, a popular firewall for WordPress sites, started blocking malicious IP addresses in huge quantity after it deployed its commercial real-time threat intelligence system for free to all sites in Ukraine ending with .UA top-level domain. It includes over 8000 Ukrainian websites getting their commercial service for free.

48 hours ago we deployed our commercial real-time threat intelligence automatically, and for free, to all Ukrainian websites with the .UA top-level domain. That has made over 8,000 sites in Ukraine using the free version of Wordfence significantly more secure.

Wordfence

It also added that Wordfence stopped providing updates to Government websites in Russia.

We have also, effective immediately, blocked Russian government websites from using Wordfence. Those sites will continue to have Wordfence installed and will function normally, but they will no longer receive any threat intelligence from our servers.

Wordfence