Cogent Communications will pull the plug on its connectivity to customers in Russia in response to President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The US-based biz is one of the planet’s largest internet backbones – the freeways of the internet – and says it carries roughly a quarter of global ‘net traffic.

Its clients range from small businesses to mobile carriers and broadband ISPs. Cogent’s role is to pipe hundreds of terabits of your internet data around the world every second. Russian state-owned Rostelecom is among the dozens of customers Cogent has in the country.

On Friday, CEO David Schaeffer told Reuters his corporation will gradually withdraw internet service from those clients. Some customers asked to be excluded from the crackdown, and may be granted continued access.

This termination of service will force those axed clients to seek other sources of network capacity. As a knock-on effect, Russian netizens could experience slower or interrupted internet connections as their ISPs and carriers react to the news. If more backbones follow in Cogent’s