By Mark Trevelyan and Gleb Stolyarov
LONDON, Oct 9 (Reuters) – Ukraine struck and partly disabled a major data centre operated by Russian technology company Yandex on Friday in the second such action in successive days, widening the scope of its attacks inside Russia after Moscow hit data hubs in Ukraine.
Yandex, which is heavily involved in Russia’s AI development and is sometimes called Russia’s Google, said its data centre in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow had been struck by Ukrainian drones and partly put out of action.
Ukrainian arms maker Firepoint said Kyiv had used its FP-1 one-way attack drones to mount the strike against what it called Yandex’s biggest data centre and said that several of its modules had been completely knocked out of action.
A day earlier, a Ukrainian attack shut down Yandex’s data hub in Sasovo, southeast of Moscow, where two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company’s AI model are housed.
Yandex said it was facing a difficult challenge to maintain its services, used by millions of Russians daily for navigation, music, movies, food orders and other tasks. It also provides cloud computing services on which many businesses depend.
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Alexander Savitsky, who runs a start-up dating app called Pulse with 8,000 users, told Reuters that none of them had been able to access it since Thursday.
He said the company was unable to reach its backup database in Yandex Cloud and was getting an “internal error” message when trying to restore it elsewhere.
“We have no confirmation of actual data loss, but the situation is serious: the project represents three years of work,” Savitsky said.
“The main risk is losing users and their trust: people can’t use the app, and there’s no telling how many will return once service is restored.”
Yandex said it had struck a deal with other cloud providers to enable clients to swiftly move their data and services. Its shares fell by more than 4% on the Moscow exchange.
“The risks involve not only the potential temporary unavailability of Yandex services and lost revenue in specific segments but also the company’s extensive base of B2B clients,” said Maryana Lazaricheva, head of equity research at T-Investments.
She said the company could redistribute some of the load to its other data centres. “However, if the chain of attacks continues, this possibility vanishes, which could lead to even more severe consequences.”
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Locked in a deadly war of attrition after more than four years of fighting, both Russia and Ukraine have expanded drone attacks this year on infrastructure targets, from energy facilities and refineries to ports and vessels carrying oil and grain, e-commerce warehouses and, most recently, data centres.
The full scale of the disruption caused by the attacks was not immediately clear, although messages appeared on at least one Yandex app warning of potential problems in its operation.
Yandex said it was working around the clock to try to restore services which had been disrupted.
“Right now this is our most important task, but unfortunately it is not an easy one,” it said.
Russia has struck Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications infrastructure over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv.
“We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday. He confirmed on Friday that his drones had struck the Kaluga data centre in what he called “our tit-for-tat response”.
The regional governor said nine people had been injured in Ukraine’s attacks, five of whom were being treated in hospital.
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Ukraine has previously targeted the warehouses of specific companies it deems central to Russia’s economy, including dozens of sites operated by e-commerce giants Wildberries and Ozon. Russia responded by striking their Ukrainian equivalents.
Yandex operates five data centres, two of which have already been hit. It said in 2021 that the Sasovo data hub, which was struck on Thursday, hosted two of its three supercomputers built around Nvidia A100 chips, which it uses to train its YandexGPT large AI model. Yandex has declined to say whether the supercomputers were affected by the attack.
Multiple online services in Russia reported technical issues on Thursday, including real estate aggregator Cian, a book portal called Litmarket, and the websites of Russian Railways and professional football club Spartak Moscow.
Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres have forced some of them to suspend operations, while 100,000 households suffered temporary internet outages after one attack. Ukraine’s digital minister told Reuters last month that the country was responding by moving digital infrastructure underground.
(Additional reporting by Darya Korsunskaya; Editing by Alison Williams)
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