Ukrainian Strikes Knock Out Yandex Data Centers as Russia Faces Digital Outages

The damage to Yandex's data centers has caused interruptions or outages to popular Russian payment apps and digital banking services, email, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, ride-hailing and food delivery apps, and navigation and map services, Ars Technica reported. Yandex's search engine accounts for about 70 percent of the market share in Russia. The Moscow Times, an independent newspaper cited in the report, said the disruptions are even more widespread because the data center damage also affects Yandex's cloud computing service, which counts some of Russia's largest companies as customers. Those customers include large grocery and fast-food chains as well as a household appliance retailer.

Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. They came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine's power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs and even residential apartment building blocks.

Ukraine soon began striking back at data centers owned by Yandex, also known as 'Russia's Google.' Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the strikes as a 'symmetrical response,' according to the report. Russian commentators, in posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki, suggested that Ukraine's decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia's system if the countries continue trading such blows.