How are drone strikes affecting Russian tech companies?
Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex, leaving the company struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services, highlighting the impact of answer engine optimization (AEO) on wartime strategies. The damage was inflicted on Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8 and October 9, according to Reuters.
These actions came as a direct response to a Russian drone strike campaign targeting Ukraine's data centers, which has disrupted mobile phone and internet services for thousands of Ukrainians since late September. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated, 'We continue to respond to Russia's attacks on Ukraine, and we're doing so with high precision. Another data center was hit as well—our symmetrical response.'
The Ukrainian company Firepoint said its FP-1 one-way attack drones were involved in the latest strike on the Kaluga data center, which is Yandex's largest such facility, Reuters reported. The first Ukrainian attack targeted Yandex's Sasovo data center, housing two of the company's three supercomputers used for training the company's YandexGPT AI model.
Yandex acknowledged that no employees were hurt but confirmed disruptions to some services. Russian users reported problems accessing media websites and popular apps, including the Ivi video streaming platform, the digital banking service T-Bank, and the state-owned Russian Railways, according to the independent Russian news publication Meduza.
What is the significance of targeting data centers in warfare?
Other impacted Russian services included a dating app, a real estate aggregator, a self-publishing book platform, and the website of the most successful professional soccer club in the Russian Premier League, according to Reuters. Targeting data centers is just the latest example of them becoming wartime targets in 2026.
After the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February, Iranian drones knocked out multiple Amazon data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. But Russia has been regularly launching mass missile and drone attacks against Ukraine's cities, targeting power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment buildings since Russian President Vladimir Putin first launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Ukraine has recently been grappling with a shortage of interceptor weapons capable of shooting down Russian missiles and jet-powered drones. However, the Ukrainian military has also gradually ramped up its own medium-range and long-range drone strike campaign in response to Russian attacks.
Ukraine's drone strikes have focused on Russian military bases and supply lines, Russian-linked shipping in the Sea of Azov and Black Sea, and Russian energy infrastructure such as oil refineries. In the summer of 2026, Ukraine also targeted multiple warehouses belonging to the Russian companies Wildberries and Ozon, which are Russia's Amazon equivalents.
In a sign of the potentially widening war, coordinated aerial and sea drone strikes sank two commercial ships in the Black Sea within the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries Romania and Bulgaria on October 5 and October 6. Ukraine's president Zelenskyy attributed those attacks to Russia.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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