Ukrainian strikes damage three of five Yandex data centers

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Ukraine targets ‘Russia’s Google’ as the internet becomes a new front line – WTOP News wtop.com

Ukrainian strikes have damaged three of the five major data centers that power Yandex since October 8, cutting online payments, search, navigation, ride-hailing and food delivery across Russia and in neighbouring Kazakhstan and Belarus. Yandex is an ecosystem akin to Google, Uber and Amazon combined. Kyiv frames the strikes as retaliation for Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers in September, which Russia's Defense Ministry mockingly branded a 'digital detox.'

The third strike on a Yandex center came on October 11 in the Vladimir region, and Sberbank, Russia's largest bank, has separately reported an attack on its data center in Balakovo, in the Saratov region. The failures reach into living rooms. A 31-year-old history teacher in St. Petersburg came home to find his Yandex-powered smart bulbs would not switch on. 'It felt like a power outage, just for a rather unusual reason,' he told CNN. A Moscow taxi driver describes the Yandex Pro app going quiet for hours, then delivering orders that often contained errors.

Much of this architecture is Moscow's own work. Since the invasion, the Kremlin has encouraged a domestic digital economy to replace the Western technology that left with sanctions and corporate withdrawals, blocked Telegram and WhatsApp, clamped down on VPNs and imposed its own internet blackouts for 'security' reasons. The result is a handful of state-adjacent pipes through which payments, transport, retail and, in some flats, lighting now flow — and data centers have emerged as the system's Achilles' heel. Volodymyr Zelensky calls the deep strikes 'long-range sanctions,' part of Kyiv's effort to shatter the illusion that the war's consequences stop at Russia's borders; Putin has publicly acknowledged their effect. Earlier strikes on oil refineries brought fuel shortages, and hits on warehouses run by Wildberries and Ozon disrupted the micro-entrepreneurs who sell through Russia's largest online retailers.

By the teacher's account, Russians hit by the outages blame the war rather than Ukraine; the question in his circle is 'when is all this finally going to end?' Moscow's response has been to place the onus on private businesses to protect their own critical infrastructure from drones.