Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian data centers disrupt payments, maps and cloud services

Ukrainian drones struck five data centers belonging to Russia's largest technology companies this month, and the effects are still being felt across Russia's consumer internet, according to the Associated Press and Euronews.

Three Yandex facilities were hit between Oct. 7 and Oct. 11, in Sasovo in the Ryazan region, in Kaluga and in Vladimir, Euronews reported. The AP said the Sasovo center houses two of the company's three supercomputers. A Sberbank data center and AI hub in Balakovo, in the Saratov region, was struck on Oct. 14, and a facility near St. Petersburg serving the social network VK was hit on Oct. 18, according to both outlets.

Yandex, often called Russia's Google, said its Sasovo data center had been "seriously damaged" and that operations there were "completely suspended," BBC News reported. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attacks were a response to weeks of Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers, according to the BBC.

None of the companies has disclosed the full extent of the damage, Euronews reported. Russians have described ongoing difficulty paying for goods, ordering taxis, using navigation apps and reaching cloud storage. VK said its services were running normally after the Oct. 18 strike, but the outage tracker Downdetector logged about 6,600 problem reports that Sunday, and the monitoring group NetBlocks said VK's connectivity fell to 56% of normal, The Record reported.

Restoring the infrastructure could take months or years, and the strikes have set back Russia's artificial intelligence development, Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society, told the AP.