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

A second Ukrainian drone strike knocked out another Yandex data center in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow on October 9. This is one of the largest data centers in Russia, with a maximum 63-megawatt capacity.

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. This facility houses the third of Yandex’s three supercomputers, Galushkin, which ranked 134 on the Top 500 list and is rated at 20.64 petaflops of computing performance.

Russia’s vulnerable digital economy

More importantly for Russian society, the damage to Yandex’s data centers has reportedly 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. Yandex’s search engine also accounts for about 70 percent of the market share in Russia.

The disruptions are even more widespread, because the data center damage also impacts Yandex’s cloud computing service, which counts some of Russia’s largest companies as customers, according to The Moscow Times, an independent newspaper. These include large grocery and fast-food chains as well as a household appliance retailer.

The Russian milblogger writing under the name Ratio Militaris warned that Yandex’s hypercentralized digital ecosystem had become a wartime weakness for Russia, in a post translated by ChrisO_wiki:

Yandex and the digital ecosystem it created that had long been one of Russia’s advantages compared to even Western countries, has proven to be a weak link—including, and even primarily, due to hyper-centralization—both at the market level, where Yandex had become a powerful monopolist, and at the level of specific infrastructure solutions, where the entire power of the information giant was concentrated in a few (the exact number is no secret, but perhaps inappropriate to specify) large nodes—those aforementioned data centers.

Russian companies like Yandex will also have a hard time establishing infrastructure backup systems outside of Russia to provide additional wartime resiliency. That is partly because of 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.