Russia wants to move data centers underground after drone strikes

Russia is considering moving some of its data centers underground after Ukrainian drone strikes hit key computer facilities. Data centers are buildings full of computers that run apps, websites and online storage. When they go down, everyday services stop working. The story shows what can happen when too much depends on a few places.

What happened

Ukraine has used drones against military and infrastructure targets across Russia. Those strikes degraded or knocked out data centers run by Yandex, the state-owned Sberbank, the social site VKontakte and the Russian Ministry of Finance. Russia has also targeted Ukrainian data centers since late September, according to Ars Technica.

The effects reached ordinary users. Payment and banking apps, online stores, video streaming, ride-hailing and food delivery apps were disrupted. Yandex also had to relocate all three of its main supercomputers after drones hit the AI data centers that housed them, Meduza reported.

How Russia is responding

State telecom company Rostelcom raised the idea of moving some data centers underground in talks with the mining company Norilsk, according to the newspaper Vedomosti. Data Center Dynamics pointed to a regional governor's proposal to build data centers inside open-pit coal mines, with parks planted above as camouflage.

On November 2, Putin signed a decree telling data center operators to set aside 10 percent of their space and capacity in case the government needs it, Meduza reported. The decree also lets a government commission approve the use of foreign data centers, in consultation with the Federal Security Service. That is a notable shift, because Russia's Sovereign Internet Law had blocked companies from using computing infrastructure outside the country.

Why concentration hurts

Russia's push for a closed internet left a few companies, such as Yandex, running much of the system. That setup proved fragile in wartime. Ukraine's more spread-out services held up better. Its government has dispersed key energy and telecom sites and buried more equipment underground. Amazon and Microsoft helped it move government and other crucial services to cloud regions elsewhere in Europe soon after the February 2022 invasion. Starlink satellite terminals serve as a backup for communications.

What to do

Few businesses face drone strikes, but outages from fires, storms, cyberattacks or a single provider's failure follow the same pattern. A few questions are worth asking:

• Where are our key business tools and files backed up?
• Do payments, email and customer orders all depend on one provider?
• Is there a second way to reach customers if the main system fails?

What is not known

The underground plans are so far talk and proposals. The material does not say whether any will be built, how many data centers are involved, or how long it would take.