After eight years of heavy lifting, during which the Kremlin had tried almost everything, including content filtering, repressing social media users and banning social media networks -- LinkedIn is still unavailable in Russia -- what else could Russian legislators offer in time for the Duma elections in September? 

The direct blocking of global platforms was not an option, as Putin himself had made very clear. 

The sovereign internet was the most promising tool at the Kremlin's disposal. And so the day came for Lipov to try out his system. 

On the morning of March 10, Roskomnadzor announced that from that day on the agency would slow the speed of Twitter in Russia.

"The slowdown will be implemented on 100% of mobile devices and 50% of stationary devices," the agency said.

The deputy head of Roskomnadzor clarified that the restrictions will affect the transfer of photos and videos, but not tweets. Officials reported that the operation was conducted remotely -- so far it was going according to plan. 

And then, suddenly, it all went wrong -- government websites, including Kremlin.ru, experienced outages. 

At 10 am Moscow time, traffic dropped by as much as 24% to the Russian state telecoms provider Rostelecom, according to web evaluation data director Kentik.

And then things got even worse. According to Kentik, Roskomnadzor blocked all domains containing t[.]co -- including Microsoft[.]com and Reddit[.]com -- while attempting to block Twitter's link shortener t[.]co.

Finally, the Digital Development Ministry was forced to issue a statement admitting that Rostelecom was experiencing some failure on its routers which had caused website outages.