Ukraine strikes five Russian data centres, disrupting cloud, payments and navigation

Ukrainian drones struck five data centres linked to some of Russia's largest technology companies in October, according to the supplied report, disrupting cloud services, payment systems and navigation apps across the country. The attacks hit facilities associated with Yandex, Sber and VKontakte in several regions of Russia. The incidents were spread across the month and affected infrastructure that supports a large share of Russia's consumer internet services.

The reported strikes took place on 7, 9, 11, 14 and 18 October. Three Yandex facilities were hit in Sasovo in the Ryazan region, Kaluga and Vladimir, while a Sber data centre in Balakovo in the Saratov region and a VKontakte facility in the Leningrad region near St Petersburg were also attacked. The companies have not disclosed the scale of the damage.

The report says Russians have continued to experience problems paying for goods, ordering taxis, using navigation services and accessing cloud storage. The impact matters because Yandex, Sber and VKontakte together underpin much of Russia's consumer internet infrastructure. Their services include taxi apps, card payment processing, cloud storage and messaging, making the disruption broader than a single corporate outage.

The report says experts believe restoring the infrastructure could take months or years. It also says the strikes have set back Russia's artificial intelligence development, according to Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society. The attacks come amid a wider pattern of infrastructure strikes between Russia and Ukraine.

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The supplied report says Russia has been systematically targeting Ukrainian data centres this autumn as well. On 19 October, a Russian strike destroyed one of the largest facilities of the Ukrainian operator Datagroup in Kyiv, which was declared beyond repair, and the following day another Russian attack damaged Kyiv's GigaCenter. Earlier Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres in September and October were also reported.

The report places the latest attacks in the context of Russia's broader effort to control and harden its digital infrastructure. Under legislation designed to create a so-called sovereign internet, companies are required to store data on servers inside Russia, which concentrates critical systems in-country. That concentration can make facilities easier to target, while Ukraine has moved most of its data to servers in European countries, limiting the effect of later attacks.

The report also notes that Moscow has targeted Ukraine's IT systems since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. What remains unclear is the full scale of the damage at each site and how long repairs will take. None of the companies named in the report has publicly detailed the extent of the disruption.

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