In recent months, Ukraine has continued attacking Russian energy infrastructure while Russia has continued its usual indiscriminate bombardment of Ukrainian cities. But the past few weeks have seen something new as well. The Ukrainian military has made headlines by attacking Russian data centers, and Russia has done the same. Meanwhile in the Middle East, Iran has attacked several data centers in the Persian Gulf and seen at least one of its own data centers hit.
This is the new face of war. So crucial are data centers, to companies and to us ordinary internet users, that attacking them has become an extremely attractive proposition.
In recent months, Ukraine has continued attacking Russian energy infrastructure while Russia has continued its usual indiscriminate bombardment of Ukrainian cities. But the past few weeks have seen something new as well. The Ukrainian military has made headlines by attacking Russian data centers, and Russia has done the same. Meanwhile in the Middle East, Iran has attacked several data centers in the Persian Gulf and seen at least one of its own data centers hit.
This is the new face of war. So crucial are data centers, to companies and to us ordinary internet users, that attacking them has become an extremely attractive proposition.
On Oct. 9, Yandex, the digital omnibus giant known as Russia’s Google, posted a statement on Telegram, the Russian messaging network. “In the night of Oct. 7-8, Yandex’s data center in Sasovo was seriously damaged by a drone attack. Its operations were completely halted. This morning, another of our data centers, in Kaluga, was attacked. Part of the infrastructure was disabled.”
The company continued: “Data centers are the ‘iron heart’ of Yandex. Their availability is critical for services that have become part of people’s daily lives. Millions of users check traffic jams and plan routes, listen to music, watch movies, order groceries, and get answers to questions. Our technologies help hundreds of thousands of companies conduct business: accept orders, serve customers, and interact with partners.”
That’s precisely why Ukraine attacked them. Two days later, Kyiv attacked a third one, and after that, it hit the data center belonging to Sberbank, the state-owned Russian bank. The indefatigable Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told an international conference in Warsaw that thanks to the Yandex attacks, “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms. There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots—and it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.”
Journalists from the Kyiv Post later established that it was general Yandex bot traffic that went down after the Ukrainian strikes, not specifically the poisonous messages shared by automated social-media accounts. But even though the strikes didn’t manage to liberate the West from Russian fake news, they did achieve something else: They rattled Russians’ comfortable digital lives.
“Russians have struggled to access their Yandex emails, open work files or book taxis. In some cities, timetables disappeared from bus stop displays. And residents of many Moscow apartment blocks found themselves unable to enter shared courtyards because the barrier gates were operated by a single company reliant on Yandex infrastructure,” the Financial Times reported. Goodbye, modern life in Russia (at least partly and temporarily).
During the Blitz of World War II, Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe bombed British arms factories, but it also bombed ports and critical national infrastructure. Partly because precision bombing was difficult back then, it also struck homes, churches, and other civilian buildings. When the Royal Air Force attacked German cities, it too struggled to find the arms factories, railways, and ports that it wanted to destroy. This is why the fierce Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris introduced what was euphemistically referred to as “area bombing”—namely, the carpet bombing of entire cities such as Dresden.
Compared to such violence, a few drone attacks against data centers seem like manageable pain. When Russia unleashed a string of attacks on Ukrainian data centers last month, Ukrainians stoically endured the loss of connectivity. After one of the strikes, the Russian Defense Ministry callously called the attacks a “mandatory digital detox” for Ukrainians. But for most Russians, who have continued living comfortable lives while their military has savaged Ukraine, the loss of connectivity caused by Ukraine’s retaliatory strikes against Yandex was painful.
The first known attacks on data centers came not from Russia or Ukraine but from Iran. Within hours after the U.S.-Israeli attack on the country on Feb. 28 this year, Iran responded by blocking the Strait of Hormuz—and striking Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates. Ten days later, a data center belonging to Iran’s state-owned Bank Sepah was hit by a missile. A couple of weeks after that, Iran struck an Amazon data center in Bahrain.
Imagine spending a week without the internet. You’d discover that the internet is about much more than emailing, streaming videos, and doing online banking. It powers virtually everything that we—and companies and organizations—do every second of every day. Most governments have satellite-based backup systems, but satellites can only transmit a small percentage of the traffic that any country needs.
Thus while some government services can endure, in the aftermath of strikes, companies cannot operate, and money cannot be transferred. What’s more, as I explain in my new book, Undersea War, your credit and debit cards would not work (unless you live in Sweden, Finland, or Australia).
That’s why hitting data centers is so attractive. The attacker disrupts all the crucial services provided by digital connectivity and renders civilians’ lives miserable. And remember, internet outages cause disruption that lingers long after a data center has been repaired.
As Ukrainians know, data center warfare is not just about inconveniences for internet-addicted citizens: It’s about targeting and disrupting backbone of modern societies and economies. That means that it will be an inevitable part of every future conflict.