The war between Russia and Ukraine has come for data centers.
Forces from both sides have recently ramped up attacks on infrastructure that serves as the backbone to web-connected services and artificial intelligence systems.
The Russian military hit a data center in Kyiv and other telecommunications sites, while Ukraine struck back by damaging three major data centers operated by the technology giant Yandex, often referred to as Russia’s Google, and a data center run by Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank.
The targeting of data centers is a relatively new phenomenon in the war, now in its fifth year since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a speech on Monday that the targeting of Yandex was “responding to Russia’s operation against our data centers.”
The strikes on digital infrastructure have come on top of intensifying attacks on energy installations, including a recent Russian barrage of dozens of ballistic missiles that cut power to 600,000 people in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries, one of the factors pushing global diesel prices to record highs, have drawn a rebuke from President Trump, who has pushed for Ukraine to limit its strikes as energy-driven inflation accelerates ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.
Since the boom in artificial intelligence has generated a seemingly insatiable demand for computing power, data centers have emerged as increasingly important economic hubs. That makes these installations high-value targets for the drones that now define modern warfare, and not only in Russia and Ukraine. Shortly after the start of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, Iranian drones struck Amazon data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, disrupting computing services for users around the region.
The disruptions to daily life and business after the strikes on data centers have varied in Russia and Ukraine, said Vili Lehdonvirta, a technology policy professor at Finland’s Aalto University. Ukraine’s data centers are important to enabling remote work in a country under regular bombardment, but the country had shifted much of its government and banking data to American and European facilities at the start of the war, he said.
Russia’s government and private-sector systems are “mostly hosted in domestic data centers,” Mr. Lehdonvirta said. The government passed legislation requiring companies, including tech firms, to store personal data on servers inside the country, prompting may businesses to invest millions of dollars to build local data centers. Cross-border sanctions also make it hard for Russia to rely on internet services hosted outside its borders.
“In that sense, Russia is probably more vulnerable to data center warfare than Ukraine is,” Mr. Lehdonvirta said.
Ukraine’s attacks resulted in some of the largest internet service disruptions in Russian history. Yandex runs the country’s dominant ride-hailing app, popular streaming platforms and extensive payment processing services. It also provides cloud computing services to more than 50,000 Russian businesses that form the backbone of the country’s internet economy. Across central Russia, Yandex operates at least six large data centers, which also house its three A.I. supercomputers.
Over the past week, since Ukraine began striking Yandex’s data centers, several of the company’s apps have stopped working: users were unable to order food, taxis and download files from their cloud accounts. Street-level images in the mapping app were blurred, and the Yandex Pay system, which many Russians use to store money in digital wallets, suspended operations. leaving users with the ability to view their balances but not transfer money.
Yandex’s cloud-computing platform was “still operating in a limited mode,” the company said in an update to customers on Wednesday. “Our specialists continue the restoration work around the clock.”
Customers of Sberbank on Wednesday reported disruptions among many services, including the bank’s A.I. assistant, website and app, after a drone attack on a data center used by the bank.
Service outages also spread to Cian, the leading real estate listings platform in Russia. The website of Pulkovo, the airport serving St. Petersburg, was also knocked offline.
Mr. Zelensky has suggested that Ukraine’s strikes on Yandex’s infrastructure also took out “bots” used by the Russian government to sow discord and spread misinformation on social networks around the world.
“When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” he said in his speech on Monday. “A lot of people noticed it. There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations.”
On social media, some politicians, political consultants and commentators seized on the idea, noting that apparent drops in engagement for right-wing accounts including those associated with Elon Musk and the Alternative for Germany political party were because of damages to Russian data centers. Some cited a chart from the internet services company Cloudflare that showed that “bot traffic” from Yandex had collapsed.
In the Cloudflare context, however, bot traffic refers to so-called crawlers, or software programs that run automated tasks on the web, a company spokeswoman said, not automated accounts run by influence operations that post on social media. Many observers conflated the two in online posts.
“Across Cloudflare’s network, there was no evidence that the strikes knocked social media manipulation offline or otherwise disrupted malicious activity on the internet,” the company wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
What is not in dispute is the lasting damage that attacks on data centers can do. Experts said it could take months for Yandex to fully repair the damage. In the Emirates, some six months after its data centers were hit, Amazon said in a blog post that customers there would be unable to restore access to some of the data it had hosted in the country.
Mr. Lehdonvirta anticipates that this may be the start of a new way of waging war. “I would unfortunately expect data centers to continue to be a target,” he said.
The post To Inflict Economic Pain, Russia and Ukraine Strike at Data Centers appeared first on New York Times.
