A Yandex food delivery courier rides his scooter in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, Oct. 11, 2026. (AP Photo)
Russia prides itself on its digital advances — from an extensive e-commerce services sector to ambitious plans for developing artificial intelligence.
But now, some of the key data centers at the heart of its technical prowess have been knocked out by Ukrainian drone attacks in the 4 1/2-year-old full-scale invasion, suffering damage that could take a long time to repair.
Ukraine this month hit three main data centers belonging to tech giant Yandex, one for Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, and one for social media platform VKontakte, the country’s equivalent to Facebook.
While Yandex, Sberbank and VKontakte are coy about the damage, people and businesses across Russia have reported widespread interruptions to cloud services. Banking, e-commerce, geolocation and ride-hailing services, as well as Alisa, Yandex’s virtual assistant, and multimodal AI chatbots all have suffered lasting disruptions.
The fallout even spread to Russia’s judicial system, reportedly forcing arbitration courts to cancel or postpone sessions and cutting database access.
Most experts predict repairing the damage could take months, if not years. Some warn that Moscow’s aspirations to become a leader in AI development could be significantly set back.
“This effectively sets Russia far behind in the AI race,” said Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society activist group.
Data centers are the latest targets of aerial campaigns waged by both sides against each other’s vital infrastructure.
Russian missiles and drones have pummeled Ukraine’s power grid and other key sites, part of Kremlin efforts to weaken morale and resistance. Ukraine retaliated with waves of drone attacks against Russian oil refineries, triggering a massive fuel crisis.
While oil refineries and warehouses are easy prey, data centers are even softer targets. Lasting damage can result from a drone carrying a relatively light load of explosives.
Yandex has run drills for an accident that could incapacitate one of its six data centers, but it was caught unprepared when its three key facilities were hit over four days. It wasn’t immediately clear why air defenses near the sites had failed.
“The problem in Russia is that they’ve got to cover a big country with air defense and they don’t have enough,” said Nick Reiners, senior geotechnology analyst at Eurasia Group.
Ukraine has stored critical data on servers in allied European countries, helping limit the damage from Russian attacks. But Moscow’s strict digital sovereignty policy requires all data storage at home, making it extremely vulnerable.
“Because all the infrastructure and all the data is located inside Russia, it’s relatively easier to take down,” Reiners said.
Klimarev predicted the data center attacks could encourage many top Russian companies to move data abroad, while the authorities could ease their efforts to tighten internet controls to minimize the damage.
“It’s quite likely that many Russian businesses are now roaming the European market to rent computing assets,” said Klimarev.
Yandex dominates digital life in Russia and many former Soviet nations. It provides a wide variety of functions, including a search engine, cloud storage, payment apps, geolocation and ride-hailing services, and e-commerce platforms.
“Yandex is kind of like Uber and Amazon and Google and everything rolled into one,” with everything “concentrated in just a few data centers,” Reiners said. “From a strategic perspective, they’re an excellent target.”
The attacks on Yandex caused unprecedented disruptions, paralyzing payments, online orders, taxi rides and access to personal data.
