Russians locked out of bank accounts as Ukraine hits Yandex data centers
Another driver, Valery from Krasnodar, had only been on the job for a few months, having previously worked at a packing center for Wildberries, Russia’s retail giant, whose warehouse was attacked by Ukrainian drones in July.
When the Yandex outages started, he said the taxi app would show error messages or even send several cars for the same customer.
While that has been largely resolved, Valery said the biggest issue for him was that he couldn’t withdraw the money that he had already earned with Yandex. “If I can’t access my pay in another week or two, I will start looking for another job,” Valery, 24, said.
In addition to Yandex, the data centers of Russia’s biggest bank Sberbank and tech giant VK have also been targeted in recent days.
That chaos is no accident, analysts say. “Ukraine’s campaign from the start has had as one of its objectives bringing home to ordinary Russians the fact that they are at war, and this involves consequences,” Keir Giles, an associate fellow at Chatham House, told NBC News.
The aim, Giles said, is for everyday Russians to conclude that their lives are being disrupted because of their leaders’ actions in waging war.
Yandex may also be a target because of its role in shaping what Russians see online, said Robert Tollast, a drone expert and researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
Data centers also have growing military value, Tollast added, as both sides use battlefield data to improve operations and commanders’ situational awareness, potentially with AI-assisted planning.
Asked about the outages and whether the government was looking into financially assisting those affected, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was premature to talk about government support because Yandex is “facing difficulties,” but is “strong and powerful.” Meanwhile, Russian authorities were looking at protecting data centers after the “unprecedented attack,” said Minister of Digital Development Maksut Shadayev.
On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin held a meeting on enhancing the level of digital security in Russia, but Peskov said it was not linked to the attacks on data centers.
Russia has increasingly ramped up its own attacks on Ukrainian data centers, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accusing Moscow of trying to “leave Ukrainians without the internet.” Ukraine was reciprocating those strikes by hitting Yandex, he said in a speech last week, adding without providing evidence that “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms” because there were fewer Russian bots around. NBC News could not verify if Yandex services going down had that effect.
While both sides have hit data centers, Russia’s were an easier target, said Mykhailo Samus, a Ukrainian military analyst and director of the New Geopolitics Research Network.
While Ukraine’s data centers are widely dispersed, many of Russia’s are concentrated in a handful of large facilities, he said, meaning a strike on a single site can disrupt services spanning transport, internet access and payments.
“Very easy and very important,” he said.
