A second attack with Ukrainian drones on October 9 brought down another Yandex data center in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow. It is one of the largest data centers in Russia, with a maximum capacity of 63 megawatts.
A third Ukrainian drone attack forced Yandex to suspend operations at its data center in Vladimir, east of Moscow, on October 11, according to BBC News. This facility houses the third of Yandex’s three supercomputers, Galushkin, which is ranked 134 on the Top 500 list and has a computing power of 20.64 petaflops.
Russia’s vulnerable digital economy
More importantly for Russian society, damage to Yandex’s data centers would have caused disruptions or blackouts in popular payment apps and digital banking services, email, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, ride-hailing and food delivery apps, and navigation and mapping services. The Yandex search engine also accounts for about 70 percent of the market share in Russia.
The outages are even more widespread because data center damage also affects Yandex’s cloud computing service, which counts some of Russia’s largest companies among its clients, according to The Moscow Times, an independent newspaper. These include large grocery and fast food chains, as well as an appliance retailer.
The Russian milblogger who writes under the name Ratio Militaris warned that Yandex’s hypercentralized digital ecosystem had become a weakness for Russia in times of war, in a post translated by ChrisO_wiki:
Yandex and the digital ecosystem it created, which had long been one of Russia’s advantages even in comparison with Western countries, has proven to be a weak link (including, and even mainly, due to hypercentralization), both at the market level, where Yandex had become a powerful monopolist, and at the level of specific infrastructure solutions, where all the power of the information giant was concentrated in a few (the exact number is no secret, but perhaps it is not appropriate to specify it) big ones. nodes: the aforementioned data centers.
Russian companies like Yandex will also find it difficult to establish infrastructure support systems outside of Russia to provide additional resilience in times of war. This is due in part to the “Sovereign Internet Law” passed by the Russian parliament and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin in 2019, according to Russian milblogger Artjockey, whose writing was translated by ChrisO_wiki.
