AI-rewritten: This is a summary of an article from Ars Technica, rewritten by AI (Qwen, running locally) to make it easier to read. The facts come from the original article – read it for the full story.

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Russia launched a drone campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure in late September, disrupting internet and phone service for up to 100,000 households in Kyiv. In response, Ukraine began striking back at Russian tech giant Yandex’s data centers starting on October 8. The first attack damaged a facility in the Sasovo region that houses two of Yandex’s supercomputers used to train its AI model. A second strike on October 9 knocked out another major center in the Kaluga region, while a third forced operations to suspend at a Vladimir site on October 11.

These disruptions have caused widespread outages for Russian payment apps, digital banking, email, e-commerce, and navigation services. Yandex’s search engine holds about 70 percent of the market share in Russia, and its cloud computing service hosts many large companies, including grocery chains and appliance retailers. Pro-Kremlin bloggers warn that this hyper-centralized system has become a wartime weakness, noting that it is difficult for Russian firms to establish backup infrastructure outside the country due to laws blocking access to friendly nations and sanctions from unfriendly ones.

By contrast, Ukraine utilizes a decentralized digital ecosystem with smaller data centers and has received free cloud services from Western giants like Amazon to migrate government data. While Yandex may take up to six months to replace damaged equipment, Ukrainian services have largely continued operating despite sustained missile attacks.