War in Ukraine and what it means for Read the Docs

With news surrounding the invasion of Ukraine evolving rapidly, we felt it was necessary to provide an update to our users and customers.

At Read the Docs, we are outraged and saddened by the invasion of Ukraine and we condemn this act of violence as wrong and unlawful. We are monitoring the situation in Europe and how it relates to our employees, customers, and our services to the open source world.

Read the Docs is a very small company, with only seven employees, and fortunately none of them are currently in harm’s way. Our impact on the open source ecosystem, however, is bigger than our size, and we have users all over the world, including in Ukraine and Russia.

Impact on our services

We are continuing to monitor news that could potentially affect our users, including sanctions applied to the region.

Read the Docs is currently partially blocked in Russia by the Russian government. While we are working to resolve this, it does not appear that this block is related to war in Ukraine.

Other than this government block and potential effects from financial sanctions, our services are not impacted. Read the Docs is hosted and incorporated in the United States, and so any further changes to US sanctions would apply to our services.

What we are doing and what you can do

As the situation develops, we will be transparent about any actions we take. We take our role of helping the open source community with documentation seriously and we aim to be a platform for all developers.

Over the coming days, our advertising arm EthicalAds will be running a series of community ads aimed at raising money for the United Nations Crisis Relief Fund and other missions aimed at humanitarian aid for Ukraine. If you can donate to help provide humanitarian aid, please do.

We are hoping that peace is restored as quickly as possible.