The big story from the Ukraine war for 2026 was Ukraine’s ability to strike oil infrastructure deep in Russia. These are new capabilities stemming from the maturation of special divisions in the Ukrainian military, such as its 1st Separate Center of Unmanned Systems. Using purpose-built fixed-wing drones like the AN-196 RS and FP-6 — basically just exploding planes — Ukraine has spent this year turning up the volume on this war for Russia and the wider world through the power of important things.
But it’s not just oil. Today, a large part of Russia’s cloud and AI infrastructure has exploded. The services are disrupted or completely disabled.
In recent days, one of the focal points for the attack of Ukraine was Yandex, a company that the New York Times once called, “a version of Google, Amazon and Uber rolled into one.” As explained by Reuters, the third attack on Yandex, which happened on Sunday morning, was quite devastating, “leading to the complete shutdown of its data center in the Vladimir region.”
Per Reuters, this comes within days of attacks on another data center facility in Kalugg, and one in Sasovo near Moscow, where it sounds like Yandex does most of its training runs. (Reuters describes it as “where two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company’s AI model are housed.”)
If you take the Kyiv Post at its word, it almost sounds like a switch has been flipped, and a ton of important services are just a lot away from Russia, along with Russian services around the world. Perhaps most notably, the Alice voice assistant — Yandex’s answer to Siri or Alexa — is reportedly down. That would mean users with Yandex’s Station line of smart speaker devices wouldn’t be able to properly interact with them.
The Kyiv Post says that Yandex Music, and Telemost, its version of Google Meet, were also disabled at the time of writing on Sunday.
And since Yandex’s data centers are also critical cloud infrastructure for other services, the brunt of the outage is widely scattered – again, according to the Kyiv Post. Yandex Compute Cloud, a provider of virtual machines, is one of the services experiencing what the Kyiv Post calls “extensive outages.”
Things get a little darker when you consider just how important Yandex Cloud is over Russia. Yandex, for example, offers specialized cloud solutions for healthcare. It also offers at least some of the cloud storage uses, in theory, to protect Russian citizens’ private data for government use.
And, like the attacks you may remember from earlier this year, in which it hit distribution centers belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s answer to Amazon, these attacks are creating chaos for consumers. The Kyiv Post writes that users complained about banking and rideshare app errors on Sunday. Apps for major retail companies such as food retail behemoth Magnit, and Fix Price, which is a bit like Dollar General, are also apparently being disrupted.