Military forces have sought to damage the
computing hubs that power online services and artificial intelligence systems.
·
Attacks
on Data Centres:
Russia and Ukraine have intensified attacks on digital infrastructure. Russia
struck a data centre in Kyiv, while Ukraine targeted three major Yandex data
centres and a facility used by Sberbank.
·
Disruption
of Russian Services: The
strikes disrupted several Yandex services, including ride-hailing, food
delivery, cloud storage, digital payments and online mapping.
·
Impact
on Banking and Businesses:
Sberbank reported disruptions affecting its website, mobile application and AI
assistant. Outages also affected real estate platform Cian and the website of
St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport.
·
Yandex’s
Economic Importance:
Yandex operates major data centres and AI supercomputers and provides cloud
computing services to more than 50,000 Russian businesses.
·
Russia’s
Greater Vulnerability:
Experts suggest Russia may be more vulnerable to data-centre attacks because
government and private-sector systems rely heavily on domestic facilities,
partly owing to data-localisation requirements and international sanctions.
·
Ukraine’s
Digital Resilience:
Ukraine shifted much of its government and banking data to American and
European facilities after the invasion, reducing its dependence on domestic
data centres.
·
AI
Infrastructure at Risk: The
growing demand for computing power has made data centres increasingly important
economic and strategic assets, creating new targets in modern warfare.
·
Global
Precedent:
Iranian drone strikes on Amazon data centres in Bahrain and the UAE earlier in
the US-Israeli war on Iran disrupted cloud computing services in the region.
·
Misinformation
Claims Disputed:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested that the attacks disrupted
Russian government-linked online influence operations. However, Cloudflare said
there was no evidence that the strikes had disrupted social media manipulation,
clarifying that the reported decline in Yandex bot traffic referred to
automated web crawlers.
·
Prolonged
Recovery:
Experts warn that restoring damaged data centres could take months. Amazon has
also reported lasting data-recovery problems following attacks on its
facilities in the UAE.
Key
Takeaway: The
Russia-Ukraine conflict is increasingly extending to data centres, cloud
computing and AI infrastructure. Attacks on these facilities can disrupt
banking, business operations and essential digital services, highlighting the
growing strategic importance and vulnerability of digital infrastructure during
warfare.
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 many 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
and 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 due to damage 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.