One day last month, scientists at Moscow’s leading cancer research center realized they had lost access to several online databases crucial to their work. And that wasn’t their only problem.

Most Google services were down too, for all Russian internet users. That mean not only search, Gmail and YouTube, but less high-profile but nonetheless critical services such as CAPTCHA — the widely-used system for verifying that a log-on comes from a real human rather than a bot. With this out of action, many websites were effectively locked shut.

Services provided by other foreign online giants such as Amazon were offline too. The list went on and on. Car dealerships couldn’t process insurance payments. Passengers had trouble checking in for flights. Video-gamers were locked out of their favorite daily addiction.

In the process, Russians were also getting an insight into some of the internet’s more obscure inner workings — and how dependent they were on services outside their borders. The editor of the country’s most popular sports news site announced that they had lost all their type fonts, because the are provided and hosted externally by Google. The internet was literally disappearing in front of the eyes of Russian users.