Russia was not prepared for the data center war it had started with Ukraine

Russian bloggers warn that Russia's over-centralized digital economy is vulnerable.

When Russia began attacking Ukraine's data centers and telecommunications infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Russia's digital services are now facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone attacks knocked out three data centers belonging to Russian tech giant Yandex within days.

According to posts translated by independent researcher ChrisO_wiki, pro-Kremlin bloggers warn that Russia's centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is unprepared for the "data center war" that has begun. Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine's decentralized digital services could be more flexible than Russia's system if those countries continue to trade such strikes.

Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted internet and mobile phone services for more than 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and were part of a wider campaign of long-range attacks that saw Russian missiles and jet drones hit Ukraine's power grid infrastructure, transport hubs and even residential apartment blocks.

But Ukraine soon launched attacks on data centers owned by the Russian company Korindex, also known as the "Google of Russia," in a response that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described as a "symmetric response."

The first Ukrainian drone strike on October 8 damaged a data center in the Sassovo district, southeast of Moscow, that houses two of three Yandex supercomputers for training its YandexGPT artificial intelligence model.

It is not yet clear how much damage may have been done to the supercomputers that are based on Nvidia A100 graphics chips. The Chervonenkis supercomputer has a computational performance of 29.42 petaflops and is ranked 101st on the list of top 500 supercomputers, while the Lyapunov supercomputer is ranked 161st with 20.03 petaflops.

A second Ukrainian drone strike destroyed another Yandex data center in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow on October 9. It is one of the largest data centers in Russia with a maximum capacity of 63 MW.

A third Ukrainian drone strike then forced Yandex to suspend operations at its data center in Vladimir, east of Moscow, on October 11, according to BBC News. The center houses the third of Yandex's three supercomputers, Galushkin, which is ranked 134th in the Top 500 list and has 20.64 petaflops of computing performance.

Most importantly for the Russian community, damage to Yandex data centers was reported to have caused interruptions or outages in popular Russian payment apps and digital banking services, email, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, ride-hailing, food delivery apps, and navigation and map services. Yandex search engine also has about 70% of the Russian market share.

According to the independent Moscow Times newspaper, the disruptions are even more widespread, as the data center damage also affects the Yandex cloud computing service, which counts some of Russia's biggest companies as customers. These include large grocery and fast food chains as well as a home appliance retailer.

In a post translated by ChrisO_wiki, a Russian journalist writing under the name Ratio Militaris warned that Yandex's overly centralized digital ecosystem has become a wartime vulnerability for Russia:

Yandex and the digital ecosystem it created, which has long been one of Russia's advantages compared to Western countries, have proven to be a weak link - including, and even primarily, due to excessive concentration - both at the market level, where Yandex has become a powerful monopoly, and at the level of specific infrastructure solutions, where perhaps all the power of the information giant is concentrated in a few. inappropriate to determine) large nodes - those aforementioned data centers.

Russian companies such as Yandex will also struggle to build infrastructure backup systems outside of Russia for greater wartime flexibility. This is partly due to the "Independent Internet Law" passed by the Russian parliament and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin in 2019, according to Russian mail blogger Artjockey, whose post was translated by ChrisO_wiki.

In pursuit of an "independent internet," the government has effectively blocked Russian companies from using infrastructure even in friendly countries, while "unfriendly" countries have blocked access through sanctions anyway... It's virtually impossible to emulate Russian IT infrastructure in places like Belarus or Kazakhstan—though, in any case, the capacity simply isn't there. China may have this capacity, but it would require legislative changes to allow key services and registrations to be transferred there.

In comparison, Ukraine has a more decentralized digital ecosystem made up of smaller data centers. It has also taken measures to create supporting infrastructure, including moving some equipment and networks underground or abroad.

Western tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon have also offered free cloud services to help Ukraine migrate critical government services to other parts of Europe, enabling many of Ukraine's essential digital services to continue despite Russian missile and drone attacks. Amazon Web Services alone hosts more than 15 petabytes of data from more than 60 Ukrainian government agencies, along with data from Ukraine's largest private energy company, DTEK.

Meanwhile, the Russians may have to wait up to six months for Yandex to replace the damaged data center equipment, according to an anonymous IT expert, in an interview with Russian newspaper Kommersant. Given Amazon's experience following Iranian drone attacks that destroyed several data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates earlier this year, a long timeline for repairs may not be too surprising.

Jeremy Hsu is a reporter covering a wide range of topics in deep technology and artificial intelligence. He has previously written for New Scientist, Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum, Wired, Undark Magazine, and MIT Tech Review, among many other publications, on topics such as deepfakes, data centers, drones, battery technology, robotics, and GPS jamming. He also holds a master's degree in journalism from New York University, and a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in the history and sociology of science, with a minor in English.