Moscow
“Something is constantly breaking, something is constantly not working,” says Anton, 31, from St. Petersburg. He came home one night in the dark. His smart bulbs wouldn’t turn on.
The bulbs are powered by Yandex, a Russian technology company that provides the Internet. associated digital services and products including cloud, search, maps, AI, ride-hailing and food delivery – an ecosystem similar to that of Google, Uber and Amazon combined.
“It’s a strange feeling when you’re sitting in a dark room and you don’t really have a way to turn on the lights. It was like a power outage, just for a rather unusual reason,” he told CNN.
Since October 8, Ukrainian attacks have damaged three of the five main data centers on which Yandex’s operations rely, disrupting the daily lives of millions of users. In Russia and neighboring countries like Kazakhstan and Belarus, the outages affected services ranging from online payments and business operations to search, navigation, ride-hailing services and food delivery.
The strikes expose vulnerabilities in Russia’s digital economy, which Moscow has encouraged to reduce its reliance on Western technology amid tough sanctions and company withdrawals following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but in which data centers have become its Achilles’ heel.
kyiv presented the attacks as retaliation for Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers in September – attacks described by the Russian Defense Ministry as a “digital detox” – highlighting the extent to which critical digital infrastructure has become another front line in the war.
For Anton, a history professor, who only gave his first name for privacy and security reasons, it was yet another reason for his weariness with what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” – now in its fifth year.
Over the past year, the Kremlin has also introduced its own internet shutdowns for “security” reasons, cracked down on VPNs and blocked popular messaging apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp.
“Every time you encounter something like this, it’s incredibly irritating. In my case, every time I think about how sick and tired I am of (President Vladimir) Putin,” Anton told CNN. He added that it seems to him that those around him are not blaming Ukraine when these attacks occur, but rather wondering “when will this finally end?”
“There’s this general fatigue. Just the fatigue of war in general. Every time, it makes me think: God, this is all so exhausting. It’s really stupid that we live in these conditions,” he says.
Russians are largely shielded from the deadly horrors of the front lines, but Ukraine has sought to shatter the illusion that the consequences of war are distant with drone strikes deep within its territory. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the strikes “long-term sanctions” against the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine.
They had an impact. Putin himself has admitted this in public statements. Attacks on oil refineries have led to widespread fuel shortages, while strikes on warehouses at Russia’s largest online retailers, Wildberries and Ozon, have wreaked havoc for the micro-entrepreneurs who rely on their networks.
Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, also reported an attack on its data center in Balakovo, Saratov region, on Wednesday. The Kremlin, meanwhile, has put private companies in charge of protecting their critical infrastructure against Ukrainian drone attacks.
A 33-year-old Moscow taxi driver told CNN that he and other drivers experienced problems with the Yandex Pro app they use to receive and manage rides, after the third attack on a Yandex data center on October 11 in the Vladimir region. The driver asked to remain anonymous out of concern for his livelihood.
“At first, the application started to malfunction: no orders arrived for hours, and when they did arrive, they often contained errors. For example, Yandex could send four different cars and drivers to the same order. Even after arriving at the pick-up point and calling the passenger, the drivers would discover that the passenger had already left in another taxi,” he recalls.
He said the most serious problem was that drivers could not withdraw the money they had earned, making it difficult for them to pay for their car rental and fuel. He eventually had to return his rental car to the taxi fleet because he couldn’t afford to continue driving and not making money while paying for the vehicle.
“For many drivers, it’s not just a technical problem: it’s a question of whether they can continue to work and support themselves,” he told CNN.
Tatiana, a Moscow resident who asked CNN to use a pseudonym, said she woke up Tuesday to find that savings of 1.5 million rubles (about $17,830) were no longer visible in her Yandex Pay account — the Russian equivalent of Apple Savings, which stopped operating after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. She had been saving for a car.
“Panic took over me and I cried. I was bracing myself for the thought that I might never see that money again.” Tatiana said she hoped for the best.
Yandex said in a statement that customers’ money was safe and that it was working to restore the app’s services after the attacks on the three data centers.
Ukrainian defense company Fire Point trolled Yandex on X in response to a statement by the head of the tech giant’s fintech division, Dima Pirogov.
“Dima, have you tried turning it off and on again,” Fire Point replied.
As Ukraine faces pressure from its main ally, the United States, to end strikes on Russian energy infrastructure and maintain supplies of Russian diesel to global markets, the message from kyiv is clear: it still has ways of making life uncomfortable in the Kremlin.
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