// TOM'S HARDWARE US — HARDWARE & GADGET
Ukrainian drones hit Russian data centers, disrupting Russian apps and services
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Over the past week, Ukraine attacked some of Yandex's biggest data centers, disrupting the operations of various Russian national applications and metropolitan digital services. Russia, which has itself targeted Ukrainian data centers in recent weeks.
Worse yet for Russia, its online disinformation activities appear disrupted by these attacks. Although not as catastrophic as some initial reports claimed, a new report from Cloudflare claims that the bot traffic merely migrated to other hosts.
Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the war has moved through several phases. From the pushback of Russian forces in 2022, to the rapid deployment of FPV drones in 2023, to the mid-range drone strike campaigns both sides have focused on since 2025. Over that time, the targets have changed. Ukrainian supporters published "bingo cards," with various refineries and warehouses listed, often superimposing fire graphics to showcase when they'd been damaged or destroyed.
There are tens of major targets across different industries and networks; there are only a handful of Yandex data centers. Although there is a more expansive list of data centers from other providers that support the Yandex cloud network, most are small, only offering a few megawatts of compute capacity.
Considering that targeting just three of Yandex's facilities brought several key digital services such as shopping and taxi apps to their knees in major Russian cities, it may not take much for Ukraine to severely hamper the modern digital elements of Russia's economy and society at large.
While Ukraine isn't immune to similar attempts at disruption, its already-hardened networks and expansive list of allies make it far more resilient.
While overreliance on digital services from American companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon has its own drawbacks, in Ukraine's case, it's been a far more resilient strategy than Russia's. Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers have caused some disruption, but much of Ukraine's digital infrastructure runs on Amazon's AWS cloud platform. That includes distributed hosting, resilient service structure, and AI integration.
That means that when Russia hits Ukrainian data centers, the services can be quickly migrated to another data center, perhaps located in another country entirely. Amazon has the world to fall back on if necessary. Ukraine also has allies in many other technologically advanced nations that can provide digital infrastructure and expertise, including access to the latest AI cybersecurity models.
In contrast, Russian internet and services are far more inward-facing. It has attempted to cut its population off from the outside world by banning Western services like WhatsApp and Telegram, pushing its citizens towards government-run applications like Max.