The air defences around Saratov’s embattled oil refinery braced as swarms of drones bore down from the west. But the drones were bound for a less conspicuous target 100 miles away, a squat data centre housing Russia’s biggest supercomputer. They slammed into its facade after sweeping through unprotected skies, setting it ablaze and sending servers around the country into darkness.
As the sun rose, Russians awoke to find their emails and online banking apps knocked out. That followed a week of disruptions to almost every corner of Russia’s online economy, from ride-hailing and music streaming to cloud computing, banking, digital payments, delivery, smart-home systems and even dating apps.
The facility in Balakovo, owned by Sberbank, Russia’s largest financial-services company, was the biggest target yet of Ukraine’s campaign against its enemy’s data centres. The bank serves 100 million customers across the country and is largely under Kremlin ownership. The attack was the first of its kind against Sberbank, though it came after a series of bombardments directed at Yandex, Russia’s largest tech giant. The strikes damaged three of the firm’s six data centres.
At first, there was speculation that the strikes on Yandex had wiped out armies of Russian bots spreading disinformation online after pro-Putin activity plummeted on social media. But instead, Ukraine had destroyed another target – one that brings the war closer to home for ordinary Russians. The strikes have intensified as Donald Trump seeks to pressure Kyiv into halting attacks on Russian energy facilities, disrupting online services across Russia.
The strikes expose the vulnerability of Russia’s tech infrastructure, where a few giant providers underpin much of everyday life in the country.
Once a search engine, Yandex has evolved into a sprawling tech conglomerate combining the functions of Google, Amazon, Uber and Deliveroo. It is also a major player in Moscow’s effort to catch up with the United States and China in artificial intelligence.
More than 84 of Yandex’s digital platforms were affected at the height of attacks, including third-party brands such as Vkusno i Tochka, the fast-food company that replaced McDonald’s after the full-scale invasion Disruptions to Yandex services have continued for days after the attacks, affecting its operations in five other countries and raising concerns that its centralised infrastructure leaves it vulnerable to disruption.
Some users complained of photographs and videos disappearing from the Cloud, while others said “Alice”, Yandex’s answer to Amazon’s Alexa, had broken down. Others claimed they had woken up to find that their balances on Yandex Pay, a banking service which became popular after Apple Pay left the country, had disappeared. Some said they could not access vital healthcare information such as glucose monitoring data.
Users of Yandex Go, the ride-hailing app, said they were unable to order or pay for taxis and drivers said they had received “phantom orders” from non-existent clients. Even Twinby, a romance and hookup app which matches users based on analysis of their data and scientific personality tests, was shut down by the attacks. Channel One, Russia’s main national television broadcaster, as well as its presidential grants website, were also affected.
Neither Yandex nor Sberbank has said whether the attacks damaged the supercomputers used to train their flagship AI models at their respective facilities. However, T-Invariant, an independent science-focused outlet described as a foreign agent by the Russian authorities, said three Yandex supercomputers had been disabled. It referred to expert analysis claiming the strikes had caused “colossal damage” to Russian IT infrastructure.
Other specialist Russian outlets have reported that the data centres may not resume operations until 2028, citing global chip shortages and difficulties in evading Western sanctions. Kommersant, a Russian business daily, gave a more modest estimate, saying they would take six months to repair. Vladimir Putin and his top officials held talks on “information security”, attended by German Gref, Sberbank’s chief executive, on Wednesday.
The Kremlin claimed the meeting was not linked to damaged data centres, but it came amid growing calls for a comprehensive government response to the wave of attacks. Valery Ermakov, the deputy chairman of Rostelecom, Russia’s largest provider of digital services, suggested establishing a “doomsday” centre to store copies of important data.
Online, Russians are divided. Writing on pages dedicated to recording outages, some called for an escalation of retaliatory strikes against Ukraine, vowing to take the country “back to the Stone Age”, while others pinned the blame on authorities for poor anti-monopoly enforcement.
One Muscovite named Nikita told The Telegraph that although he had not yet personally been affected by disruptions, they added to the mounting pile of everyday inconveniences reminding Russians of the war in Ukraine.
“It’s like Wildberries (the e-commerce company targeted by Ukraine). It can seem small, losing photographs, losing the opportunity to take a taxi, losing the ability to order something online, but every small thing is a reminder of something bigger that nobody wants to think about,” he said. Data centres have been targeted since the beginning of the full-scale war, said Joseph Jarnecki, a senior research fellow in the cyber and tech team at the Royal United Services Institute. They have also found themselves in the crosshairs of other conflicts, including Iranian attacks in the Gulf.
However, there has been an uptick in attacks in recent months. Ukraine has described its recent strikes as retaliation for Russian attacks on its own data centres in September. But Mr Jarnecki suggested that Moscow’s more centralised infrastructure could leave it more vulnerable to such attacks than Kyiv’s.
Michael H. Drucker
