UP IN FLAMES
Several online services in Russia were down Thursday because of technical issues caused by the attack.
Vladimir Putin has been humiliated after Ukrainian drones broke through air defenses to smash into a data hub that has been called “Russia’s Google.”
The stunning attack struck Yandex—a data center about 500 miles from the front lines in Moscow, the company said in a statement Thursday.
The strike marks the first major attack on a Russian data hub since the war with Ukraine began.
Russia has spent the past month targeting data centers and telecommunications infrastructure across Ukraine, including sites in central Kyiv.
The Ukrainian attack on one of Yandex’s five large data centers caused a fire and subsequent suspension of tens of thousands of servers at the site.
The AI and technology company is the developer of the region’s leading generative AI model, YandexGPT.
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It did not reveal the extent of the strike’s damage to its services.
Several online services in Russia were down on Thursday due to technical issues stemming from the attack.
Affected operations include real estate aggregator Cian, the websites of Russian Railways and professional soccer club Spartak Moscow, and the online ticket system of a state-owned bus company.
Yandex shares fell 3 percent on the Moscow Exchange, where the tech giant is seen as a proxy for Russia’s technology sector.
Over recent months, Ukraine has intensified its attacks on Russian infrastructure, targeting oil refineries and severely damaging the country’s energy system.
“Ukrainians understand that this winter could be very harsh for us. But in response, we will have no choice but to make it painful for Russia too,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Putin at the United Nations General Assembly in September.
The data center attack follows Putin’s urgent call for peace talks during an October 1 address at the Valdai Discussion Club.
Western military analysts and independent researchers have found that Russian advances in Ukraine have been hindered, despite Putin’s claims of an “inevitable” Russian victory.
Zelenskyy reported that more than 5,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the military’s counteroffensive against Russian forces in the northern Donbas.
While Putin is losing ground in the war, he’s also struggling to keep his country’s health together.
The Russian president has reportedly been trying to conceal a pneumonic plague outbreak that has forced nearly 200 people to quarantine and killed 28-year-old lab worker Darya Shipilova.
The Kremlin has dismissed reports about the outbreak.
“There is a great deal of media coverage, and the vast majority of what the media are reporting about this situation is false information,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
