Ukrainian Drone Strikes Expose the Weakness of Russia’s Centralized Yandex Digital Infrastructure

A second Ukrainian drone attack on October 9 destroyed another Yandex data center in Russia’s Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow. The facility is one of the country’s largest data centers, with a maximum capacity of 63 megawatts, according to DC Market Insights.

A third Ukrainian drone attack forced Yandex to suspend operations at its data center in Vladimir, east of Moscow, on October 11, the BBC reports. The facility houses Galushkin, the third of Yandex’s three supercomputers. Galushkin ranks 134th on the TOP500 list and delivers a rated performance of 20.64 petaflops.

Yandex outages threaten Russia’s digital economy

The damage to Yandex’s data centers has reportedly caused disruptions and outages across some of Russia’s most widely used digital services. Affected or potentially affected services include payment apps, digital banking, email, e-commerce, video streaming, ride-hailing, food delivery, and navigation and mapping platforms.

Yandex’s search engine is also used by approximately 70 percent of Russian internet users, according to StatCounter data.

The disruption extends beyond consumer applications. Damage to Yandex’s data centers has also affected its cloud-computing services, which are used by some of Russia’s largest companies, including grocery stores, fast-food chains, and electronics retailers, according to The Moscow Times.

Yandex’s centralized network has become a wartime vulnerability

A Russian milblogger writing under the name Ratio Militaris warned that Yandex’s highly centralized digital ecosystem, once viewed as one of Russia’s advantages, has also become a serious wartime weakness. The following passage was translated by ChrisO_wiki:

Yandex and the digital ecosystem it has built, which has long been one of Russia’s advantages even compared to the West, are also at the market level where Yandex has become a powerful monopoly, with all the power of the information giant tied to a small number (the exact number is no secret, but it turns out that the weak link is both at the level of specific infrastructure solutions concentrated in large nodes, perhaps inappropriate to specify, i.e. in the aforementioned data centers, including hyper-centralization, and even primarily due to hyper-centralization.

Why backup infrastructure may be difficult to build

Russian companies such as Yandex may also struggle to establish backup infrastructure outside Russia to improve their resilience during wartime. One factor is Russia’s “Sovereign Internet Law,” which was passed by the Russian parliament in 2019 and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.

According to Russian milblogger Art Jockey, the law could make it more difficult for companies to build and maintain external infrastructure. The passage was translated by ChrisO_wiki.