Ukraine has launched a series of drone strikes targeting Yandex data centers in Russia, severely disrupting the country's digital infrastructure. On October 9, a strike knocked out a major facility in the Kaluga region with a 63-megawatt capacity. Another strike on October 11 forced the suspension of operations at a Vladimir data center housing the Galushkin supercomputer, which ranked 134 on the Top 500 list with 20.64 petaflops of performance.
These attacks have caused widespread outages affecting payment apps, banking, e-commerce, ride-hailing, and navigation services. Yandex's search engine holds about 70 percent of the Russian market. The disruptions also impact Yandex's cloud services, used by major Russian retailers and fast-food chains.
Analysts warn that Russia's hyper-centralized digital ecosystem, dominated by Yandex, has become a critical vulnerability. The situation is complicated by the Sovereign Internet Law, which limits the ability to establish backup infrastructure abroad.
Source: Ars Technica · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing