Ukrainian drones struck five Russian tech data centres in October, disrupting payments and cloud services

Ukrainian armed forces struck five data centres belonging to Russia's largest technology companies during October, causing failures across cloud services, payment systems and navigation apps, according to reporting from multiple outlets.

Three Yandex facilities were hit: in Sasovo in the Ryazan region on 7 October, in Kaluga on 9 October, and in Vladimir on 11 October. A Sber data centre in Balakovo in the Saratov region was struck on 14 October, and a VKontakte data centre in the Leningrad region near St Petersburg came under attack on 18 October.

Yandex, Sber and VKontakte together run much of Russia's consumer internet infrastructure, including taxi apps, card payment processing, cloud storage and messaging. None of the three companies has disclosed the scale of the damage. Russians have reported persistent difficulties paying for goods, ordering taxis, using navigation services and accessing cloud storage.

Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society, told AP that restoring the infrastructure could take months or years, and that the strikes have set back Russia's artificial intelligence development.

Analysts describe the facilities as soft targets: vast halls filled with servers, power equipment and cooling systems where a small explosive charge can cause serious damage. Nick Reiners, senior geo-technology analyst at Eurasia Group, pointed to Russian legislation requiring companies to store all data on servers inside the country as a key vulnerability — concentrating infrastructure and making it easier to target.

Russia has itself been striking Ukrainian data centres this autumn. A Russian attack on 19 October completely destroyed one of the largest facilities of Ukrainian operator Datagroup in Kyiv, declared beyond repair. A Russian attack the following day damaged Kyiv's GigaCenter.