In mid-October, several major data centers across Russia operated by tech giant Yandex and financial institution Sber were reportedly struck by unmanned aerial vehicles. The attacks caused widespread disruptions in cloud services and crippled critical computing infrastructure. Industry analysts suggest these strikes supposedly served as retaliation for previous military operations targeting data processing facilities in Ukraine.

According to independent experts, these Russian data centers were originally designed solely for peacetime conditions, with facility architects failing to account for potential physical attacks or aerial threats. Constructing robust hardening measures and advanced protective systems would have required substantial capital expenditures. Consequently, corporate decisions to bypass these costly investments have left critical infrastructure acutely vulnerable to modern security challenges.

The drone strikes reportedly knocked out all three of Yandex’s flagship supercomputers—Chervonenkis, Lyapunov, and Galushkin—alongside critical facilities belonging to Sber. Specialists point out that standard external-air cooling systems likely allowed soot, smoke, and fine particulate matter to infiltrate server halls, severely contaminating sensitive internal components even where direct blast damage was limited. Restoring this sophisticated hardware is expected to take months.

The temporary or permanent loss of these immense computing resources threatens to derail Yandex's core artificial intelligence and search engine initiatives, which drive a significant portion of its advertising revenue. Compounded by severe international sanctions restricting access to advanced semiconductors and a persistent global chip shortage, industry observers warn that the Russian tech sector faces prolonged setbacks and a widening technological gap.

Source: www.gazeta.uz