Key facts
- Ukraine has struck three major Yandex data centers in Russia within days.
- The attacks have disrupted Yandex's payment apps, e-commerce, and search engine, which holds 70% of the Russian market share.
- Two of the targeted data centers housed supercomputers used for training Yandex's AI model.
- Russian commentators warn that the country's centralized digital infrastructure is a wartime weakness.
- Ukraine's digital services are considered more resilient due to decentralization and underground infrastructure.
- Western tech giants like Amazon are providing cloud services to Ukraine for critical government functions.
Russia's digital infrastructure is facing significant disruptions after a series of Ukrainian drone strikes targeted major data centers owned by the tech giant Yandex. Russian commentators and bloggers have warned that the country's hyper-centralized digital economy is unprepared for the "data center war" it initiated.
Within several days, Ukrainian drones damaged three key Yandex data centers located southeast of Moscow in Sasovo (October 8), southwest of Moscow in Kaluga (October 9), and east of Moscow in Vladimir (October 11). The Sasovo facility housed two of Yandex's three supercomputers used for training its YandexGPT AI model, while the Vladimir data center housed the third. The Kaluga data center is noted as one of Russia's largest, with a 63-megawatt capacity.
These attacks have reportedly caused widespread outages affecting popular Russian services, including payment applications, digital banking, e-commerce platforms, video streaming, ride-hailing, food delivery, and navigation services. Yandex's search engine, which holds approximately 70% of the Russian market share, has also been impacted. The damage extends to Yandex's cloud computing services, which serve major Russian companies.
Russian milbloggers have highlighted the hyper-centralization of Yandex's digital ecosystem as a critical wartime vulnerability. They noted that the concentration of infrastructure in a few large data centers makes the entire system susceptible to disruption. Establishing backup infrastructure outside of Russia is complicated by the 2019 "Sovereign Internet Law," which restricts the use of foreign infrastructure, and by international sanctions.
In contrast, Ukraine's digital ecosystem is described as more decentralized, with smaller data centers and measures like underground or off-site equipment migration. Western companies, including Microsoft and Amazon, have provided free cloud services to Ukraine, helping to migrate essential government functions to Europe and maintain digital services despite ongoing Russian attacks.
Repairing the damaged Yandex data center equipment could take up to six months, according to an unnamed IT expert interviewed by Kommersant.