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r/EUnews • u/innosflew • 1d ago

UKRAINE How Ukraine’s data centre strikes threw Russia into turmoil - Kyiv’s attacks exposed vulnerabilities of Kremlin effort to centralise internet services under one company

ft.com

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Ukrainian attacks on data centres of tech giant Yandex have thrown key facets of Russian daily life into turmoil, disrupting services ranging from email and taxi apps to dating sites and even electronic key fobs for Moscow apartment buildings.

Ukraine has severely damaged three of Yandex’s six data centres in the past week, wreaking havoc in a country whose tech ecosystem is centred around one vast, state-aligned company. Launched as a search engine in 1997, Yandex has become Russia’s answer to Google, Uber, Amazon and OpenAI rolled into one.

Thousands of businesses depend on its infrastructure, meaning the strikes have hit not only Yandex services but reams of unrelated companies. The disruption followed a wave of summer strikes on Russian refineries, which forced millions to queue for hours at petrol stations.

Kyiv said the attacks were in retaliation for Moscow striking Ukraine’s data centres. But the fallout in Russia has been far greater, exposing vulnerabilities created by the Kremlin’s long-term drive to centralise and control the IT sector. Many of those efforts focused around Yandex, which was forcibly sold in 2024 to investors tied to President Vladimir Putin.

“Russia has become a victim of its own policy . . . this triggered a worst-case scenario,” said Alena Epifanova, a research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Russians have struggled to access their Yandex emails, open work files or book taxis. In some cities, timetables disappeared from bus stop displays. And residents of many Moscow apartment blocks found themselves unable to enter shared courtyards because the barrier gates were operated by a single company reliant on Yandex infrastructure.

Users of Yandex Pay — a banking and payment service that took off after Apple Pay left Russia — awoke to find their account balances vanished. Yandex insisted “the money is safe”. Meanwhile, hundreds of websites have been working intermittently, including Russia’s main dating app Twinby and McDonald’s copycat Vkusno i tochka.

One Muscovite, who asked not to be named, said she was no longer able to access the free wheelchair-accessible Yandex taxi she uses to take her disabled 10-year-old to school. For two days, they have navigated the metro instead, with multiple changes and few lifts or ramps.

Some people fear years of work have disappeared. “I lost a website I had for 10 years. All the databases, photos, reviews are likely gone,” Alyona Zhiganova, founder of travel agency Proadventure, said in a Facebook video, barely holding back tears. She had previously used a US cloud provider, which stopped working after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Yandex’s entire ecosystem relied on six data centres, two of which were shut down completely by the attacks, while a third had several modules knocked out.

It has not said how long repairs will take. A person close to the company’s management said, without giving a timeframe, that they hoped to “quickly” restore “functionality” — meaning all services would be running but “somewhat more slowly than usual”. Returning to “full capacity”, however, would take several months, they said.

In a sign of the gravity of the situation, the head of Russia’s digital ministry said on Tuesday that authorities would “protect these facilities”. Putin had recently placed responsibility for anti-drone defences on businesses themselves, urging them not to seek state support.

Disruptions also spread to Russia’s neighbours, with outages on email, Yandex Pay and websites using the company’s infrastructure in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Belarus. It was particularly disruptive in Kazakhstan, where Yandex controls more than 90 per cent of the market in the two largest cities.

The Kremlin has been working for more than a decade to build a “sovereign internet”, promoting domestic players over western ones and placing critical assets under tight control.

In 2014, following Putin’s remarks about the internet being “a CIA project” with “everything going through servers in the US”, the state forced Russian companies to store all their clients’ personal data inside the country. Yandex became the central player and was finally bought in 2024 by a consortium closely connected to the president.