Srsly Risky Biz: Russia's Digital Detox Boomerang
Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers disrupted Russian cloud, payments, and apps after Moscow hit Ukrainian sites.
Risky Business reports that Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers disrupted Russia's largest domestic digital platform after Moscow's conventional attacks on Ukrainian data centers and Kyivstar, which the Russian Ministry of Defense called a "digital detox." Yandex, which combines search, cloud, payments, maps, taxis, and delivery, saw three of its six largest centers hit; cloud customers and Yandex Pay users faced outages, while the company said funds remained safe but gave no restoration time. Russia's data-localization and sovereignty rules leave most capacity inside the country, and a Bremen University researcher said 95 percent of Russian data centers are within Ukrainian drone range. The piece contrasts Ukraine's faster shift of critical services to EU sites and Microsoft, Amazon, and Starlink, and briefly previews an Anthropic report on how easily open-weight model safeguards can be removed.