Ukraine struck and partly disabled a major data centre operated by Russian technology company Yandex yesterday in the second such action in successive days, widening the scope of its attacks inside Russia after Moscow hit data hubs in Ukraine.
Yandex, which is heavily involved in Russia’s AI development and is sometimes called Russia’s Google, said its data centre in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow had been struck by Ukrainian drones and partly put out of action.
Ukrainian arms maker Firepoint said Kyiv had used its FP-1 one-way attack drones to mount the strike against what it called Yandex’s biggest data centre and said that several of its modules had been completely knocked out of action.
A day earlier, a Ukrainian attack shut down Yandex’s data hub in Sasovo, southeast of Moscow, where two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company’s AI model are housed.
Yandex said it was facing a difficult challenge to maintain its services, used by millions of Russians daily for navigation, music, movies, food orders and other tasks.
It also provides cloud computing services on which many businesses depend.
Alexander Savitsky, who runs a start-up dating app called Pulse with 8,000 users, told Reuters that none of them had been able to access it since Thursday.
Yandex said it had struck a deal with other cloud providers to enable clients to swiftly move their data and services.
Its shares fell by more than 4 per cent on the Moscow exchange.
Locked in a deadly war of attrition after more than four years of fighting, both Russia and Ukraine have expanded drone attacks this year on infrastructure targets, from energy facilities and refineries to ports and vessels carrying oil and grain, e-commerce warehouses and, most recently, data centres.
The full scale of the disruption caused by the attacks was not immediately clear, although messages appeared on at least one Yandex app warning of potential problems in its operation.
Yandex said it was working around the clock to try to restore services which had been disrupted.
Russia has struck Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications infrastructure over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv.
“We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday.
He confirmed yesterday that his drones had struck the Kaluga data centre in what he called ‘our tit-for-tat response.’
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