Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours

(united24media.com)

170 points | by ortusdux 2 hours ago

20 comments

  • wewewedxfgdf 1 minute ago
    Don't worry - this could never happen to your cloud provider.

    It's a totally different situation - they're at war.

  • PeterCorless 1 hour ago
    American and European data center providers should start thinking about design for resiliency versus drone and missile strikes.

    https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/drone-and-data-ce...

    • bojan 1 hour ago
      Not just data centers. Europe is close enough to need an all-encompassing national strategy against this.
      • ehwa37 50 minutes ago
        Europe needs a "national" strategy? Do you mean regional or international strategy?
      • user32489318 1 hour ago
        More sanctions, that will show ‘em!
    • bluedino 13 minutes ago
      I'm surprised domestic groups have not hit the US datacenters yet
    • oulipo 30 minutes ago
      That's one of the reasons that ecologist push-back against "technologists" who say "just build nuclear reactors everywhere"...

      we want a safe a decentralized infrastructure

      • machomaster 0 minutes ago
        Except that nuclear reactors are very robustly built, unlike data centers. Nuclear stations are designed to withstand against the airplane dropping in.

        Also, attack on a nuclear station is such a drastic and severe thing that it counts as the use of nuclear weapons. And if we are at that stage, it's a bit silly to worry about small things.

  • renyicircle 1 hour ago
    Damn, this would have been a good argument for the US to fund Ukrainian long-distance operations, had Russia not been so far behind in the AI race already.
    • petcat 1 hour ago
      USA provides extensive engineering support and technology transfer for Ukraine's domestic development of long-range missiles. Basically everything short of just giving them Tomahawks. Ukraine's defense industry capabilities didn't develop so rapidly for no reason.

      And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence sharing:

      > According to American and Ukrainian officials familiar with the operations:

      > Ukraine selects targets, although American intelligence reportedly also helps identify high-priority facilities.

      > The US identifies vulnerabilities at Russian energy installations.

      > American intelligence assists with mission planning, including routes, altitude, and timing to help Ukrainian drones evade Russian air defenses.

      > US involvement extends across multiple stages of planning, according to three people familiar with the operations.

      https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-helps-u...

      • senderista 17 minutes ago
        Can't really blame Russia for returning the favor in Iran.
        • petcat 13 minutes ago
          They are used to it. USA and Russia were "trading favors" in Syria for a decade. Unfortunately for Russia, those "favors" are now hitting Moscow.
      • renyicircle 1 hour ago
        Thank you for the info.
      • SV_BubbleTime 25 minutes ago
        > USA provides extensive engineering support and technology transfer for Ukraine's domestic development of long-range missiles.

        Translated, we give them the missiles, we give them the intelligence, we give them the target, we set it up… we let them push the red button.

        • toonvanvr 13 minutes ago
          You also set up Hormuz and tariffs and spread discord between EU citiz ns through speeches of high officials and threaten Greenland, causing us to prepare to defend on multiple fronts while often publicly supporting Russia too.

          Are you sure the missiles are support?

        • bdnk1 14 minutes ago
          Yeah, apparently the US does all the work. Meanwhile, Trump is asking Zelenskyy to stop the strikes.
          • petcat 9 minutes ago
            Europe is asking Zelenskyy to stop the strikes.

            They're just using USA as political cover, which is how it has always been been. USA warned Europe for decades not to become reliant on cheap Russian gas because it would be weaponized against them. The Biden administration even sanctioned German companies [1] building Nordstream 2 because it was a Russian geopolitical project.

            We see how it all turned out.

            [1] https://2021-2025.state.gov/nord-stream-2-and-potential-sanc...

      • asanineassasin 1 hour ago
        If you hand your opponent in which you actively shitstir a vietnafghanistiraqmongolia, they will use that. Life by the sword, die by the sword?
  • flerchin 14 minutes ago
    A new reason to not want a DC in my neighborhood.
  • lapkaaaa 2 hours ago
    New Startup idea - private anti-air batteries for data centers
    • qizzup 2 hours ago
      • ofjcihen 1 hour ago
        The continued integration of companies with defense like this is fascinating
    • Legend2440 2 hours ago
      Unironically could be a legit business model.

      Not just for datacenters either - warehouses, refineries, power stations, you could sell to anybody with a building full of expensive stuff.

      • throwaway85825 1 hour ago
        In some countries maybe, but in west where all the valuable infrastructure is there is absolutely no way you could get a permit to shoot down anything.
        • Legend2440 1 hour ago
          Obviously your biggest customers would be in active warzones, or areas worried about soon becoming warzones.

          Drone attacks on US soil are (hopefully!) not happening anytime soon.

          • drnick1 29 minutes ago
            > Drone attacks on US soil are (hopefully!) not happening anytime soon.

            This would be incredibly stupid. An attack on American soil could be met with a literally nuclear response against Iran or whoever perpetrated it.

          • dylan604 44 minutes ago
            Ukraine showed you can deploy from shipping containers delivered inside hostile lands quite successfully. As much stuff gets smuggled into US ports on a daily basis, sneaking a few of these into the US isn't impossible. Honestly, I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet.
            • cucumber3732842 5 minutes ago
              It hasn't been done because when people do that kind of thing to the US they get regime changed.
          • dudefeliciano 1 hour ago
            > areas worried about soon becoming warzones.

            So...the west if we go by the recent statements of chancellor Merz

        • jcfrei 1 hour ago
          believe it or not but legislation can change pretty quickly when shit actually hits the fan
          • rithdmc 1 hour ago
            I'm waiting for someone to try the self defense angle :)
      • scrollaway 4 minutes ago
        HN discover the defence industry…
      • mrweasel 2 hours ago
        I don't think it issue is selling in the current climate, producing seems like the major roadblock. If Russia, the supposed number one in air defence can't even protect their military bases, ramping up production might be hard.
      • jameshart 1 hour ago
        Oil tankers..
    • numpad0 1 hour ago
      MTCR, ITAR, EAR, NFA ...

      The US State Department will throw everything at you if you dare tried to build or possess your own guided guns and rockets, even if you were not from or in the US - because there was a US ally that exported a near-orbital solid motor sounding rocket to a Balkan nation with full factory setup and manufacturing training services without asking anybody in particular, which resulted in the recipient nation achieving prototype production and successful live fire tests of an indigenous surface to air missile system comparable to Soviet S-75 strategic SAM that was eventually selected.

      If it weren't for those pile of laws and leverages... building a SAM was doable since 1950s.

    • axus 1 hour ago
      The genie is out of the bottle, over the next 100 years this is a real problem US, China, and Europe will face.

      Though someone like Amazon will have to calculate, is the 50-year cost of protecting all facilities less than the 50-year cost of rebuilding the ones that are destroyed?

      • SyneRyder 52 minutes ago
        It's already happened to Amazon once, and they were not able to recover the data from the destroyed data centre, so they have already experienced this and have some data on which to make those decisions.
      • nradov 30 minutes ago
        This is one of the factors driving the development of orbital satellite data centers. While satellites are also vulnerable, they are at least somewhat harder to hit than a stationary terrestrial data center. For now it's questionable whether such constellations are feasible due to concerns over launch costs and cooling but some people are taking it seriously.

        https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind

        • joquarky 12 minutes ago
          Batch processing could be done in solar orbit.
        • libertine 13 minutes ago
          The difference is that to hit stationary terrestrial data center in the USA you'd need to go through multiple layers of defense systems, not to mention it would probably be an act of war.

          As for the satellites they can be jammed and there's not much you can do about it.

      • asanineassasin 1 hour ago
        Just add standardized bremer walls and bulkheads to the interior?
    • RealityVoid 2 hours ago
      There surely is a point where it's cheaper and safer to bury them underground.

      I'd invest in digging equipment for the next war.

      • drnick1 27 minutes ago
        > it's cheaper and safer to bury them underground.

        It did not help the Iranians and their nuclear facilities.

      • rithdmc 1 hour ago
        Cyberbunker was shut down too soon.
      • clan 2 hours ago
        Look up the capabilities of GBU-28 and other Bunker Busters first.
        • Legend2440 1 hour ago
          These are a lot more expensive and difficult to deploy. They weigh several tons. You can't just strap one to a $200 quadcopter and fly it over.
          • dylan604 41 minutes ago
            How many $200 quadcopters delivering blow after blow to reach the equivalent damage to a single MOAB? Is it an impossible number to reach for those unable to deliver MOAB?
            • Legend2440 23 minutes ago
              We're talking about bunker-busters - the MOAB is not a bunker buster. It's an airburst weapon designed to clear out large open spaces, and isn't effective against hardened bunkers.

              No reasonable amount of quadcopters could match a bunker-buster. Surface explosions are not very effective against buried targets.

              The weight and density of the bunker-buster is extremely important to its operation. When dropped from a high altitude, it breaks into the bunker with sheer kinetic force, and then explodes once inside.

            • nradov 12 minutes ago
              Those are entirely different missions. A GBU-43 MOAB is used against soft targets on the ground. A GBU-28 is used against hardened buried targets. It's simply physically impossible to dig a big enough hole with a bunch of small drones or bombs: the only way to penetrate deeply enough is with a hard object moving really fast.
            • cucumber3732842 1 minute ago
              >How many $200 quadcopters delivering blow after blow to reach the equivalent damage to a single <orders of magnitude larger purpose designed munition>?

              How long do I have to piss on a steel plate to get the same effect as a waterjet cutter?

              About the same answer.

            • RealityVoid 35 minutes ago
              A MOAB apparently has the equivalent of 11tons of TNT. A drone carrying a grenade has up to 180 grams. So you need about 61 111 drones to deliver the equivalent explosive. At that point it might be cheaper to just bring the MOAB.
              • dylan604 22 minutes ago
                61111 * $200 is only a little over $12million. The plane to deliver the MOAB is more than that. Also, why does it need to be a grenade? Why not deliver C4 or other explosive material?
          • 2OEH8eoCRo0 48 minutes ago
            When will the payload be quadruped robots that can walk in through the door?
        • numpad0 1 hour ago
          You don't dig a hole deep enough that Bunker Busters can't penetrate. You drive up to the root of a mountain where it meets flats and drill sideways. Getting your men out in case the entrance was bombed can be tricky though.
        • jcfrei 1 hour ago
          to use a GBU-28 or similar you need to establish air superiority first
        • RealityVoid 1 hour ago
          The current crop of "cruise missiles" are cheap and low penetration. Burying things is not 100% safe, but it certainly increases the attack difficulty.
      • bookofjoe 1 hour ago
        "Silo"
    • asanineassasin 1 hour ago
      You could do a ghaza and park human shields over military relevant infrastructure? Introducing Host.Age housing the only housing with free heating, free warn water and free leftover tokens .
    • odiroot 2 hours ago
      Sounds like Snow Crash becoming slowly a reality.
    • yolp5 1 hour ago
      I saw a video the other day advertising AI-powered a anti-air/drone gun. Seems to be part of a defense trade show, but also seemed to indicate that it was available to certain "qualified" citizens, but I'm not sure what that means exactly
    • dylan604 47 minutes ago
      Wouldn't it be cheaper to just build a fence around the building? They are cheap and easily repaired.
    • klvino 1 hour ago
      Releasing drone swarms wrapping in chaff with IR lamps or laser diodes to account for different guidance methods. They cluster around predicted trajectory. Could be more cost effective than a Patriot battery
      • omgwtfbyobbq 1 hour ago
        They don't all have to be drones in the conventional sense. A subset could be a set of balloons with different amounts of helium, an arduino/servos that control one or more fans for directional and limited altitude control, and a box/release with chaff inside.

        Whatever isn't used/destroyed could be recovered wherever it lands after a day or two.

        It should be less expensive a possibly more effective in certain circumstances because of increased carrying capacity.

    • delecti 2 hours ago
      I'm extremely surprised that isn't already a thing. I'm similarly surprised that all the datacenters which get press for the negative impact on the surrounding communities have remained untouched.
    • idiotsecant 1 hour ago
      I look forward to anthropic drone swarms defending against AWS mounted infantry and OpenAI cruise drones. SpaceX is at war with Pepsi. SpaceX had always been at war with Pepsi.
      • joquarky 6 minutes ago
        A lot of dystopian science fiction is turning out to be a bit more on the optimistic side.
    • tokai 1 hour ago
      Russian companies have had mercenaries of different kinds for some time now. Im sure Redut has anti air batteries.
      • throwaway85825 1 hour ago
        Much of this was taken back into government control after Wagner shot down government helicopters and a plane.
        • tokai 1 hour ago
          No, only Wagner. Redut is controlled by GRU, but its not financed by the russian state. And beside fighting in Ukrain they still provide security for the russian oil industry. Like how US mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan took orders from MOD, while being private entries.
    • idontwantthis 1 hour ago
      Russia recently ordered corporations to start funding their own air defense.
    • toomuchtodo 2 hours ago
      You can always exhaust anti air defenses faster than they can defend if sufficiently prepared. Decoys help, just as you would with an intercontinental ballistic missile. Defender has to succeed 100% of the time, attacker needs to succeed once.

      If your strategy assumes you can succeed against Iron Dome (which, I argue, is the state of the art for available air defense system), you should always be able to win as an attacker. Just have to test defenses ahead of time to understand level of effort required (munition capabilities, cadence, and quantity required, broadly speaking).

      https://missilethreat.csis.org/countermeasures-penetration-a...

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome

      • numpad0 46 minutes ago
        Russian suicide drones are still like minimum $10k each. That's probably like ~1k rounds in 12.7mm/14.5mm or ~200 rounds in 20mm. Missiles are a lot more expensive, but the defense side cost can be substantially lower than the offense side if you could make it work with an auto turret rather than guided missiles.
        • toomuchtodo 27 minutes ago
          Smart munitions for the early warning, signal intelligence, and radar, second wave is dumb, fast, cheap munitions for kinetic solving.
      • doublerabbit 1 hour ago
        More DCs are than obviously required for the battery stores that these laser turrets will shoot.

        Obelisks from Command and Conquer pinned to the roof of the DC would be amusing although personally I'm leaning towards prism towers.

        • dylan604 35 minutes ago
          Will we get degraded performance notifications when the DC's power suddenly prioritize the lasers over the GPUs? At 15:34UTC, we noticed degraded performance due to an incoming drone strike. Normal performance was restored at 15:42UTC once the strike was defeated.
        • toomuchtodo 1 hour ago
          The fundamental challenge is that it will never be economically feasible to provide the necessary defense hardware at scale. Iran beat back the US military (“most powerful military in the world” quote unquote) and Ukraine Russia’s military on a shoestring budget. You can protect some targets some or most of the time, you cannot protect all potential targets all of the time.

          If someone wants to take out a data center, they will likely succeed assuming they have the resources (probably military drones, but perhaps more traditional ballistic artillery). The world has become a more dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable place, for gestures broadly at everything reasons.

          (thoughts, opinions, and threat model always my own)

    • outside1234 1 hour ago
      Wouldn't work. They would just send enough drones to overwhelm it or run it out of ammos or Russia out of money. This is the lesson we are learning the hard way in the Middle East.
    • HlessClaudesman 1 hour ago
      New Startup idea - A railgun that launches dictators and fascists into the sun.
    • cheney_2004 2 hours ago
      The last thing we need is more Silicon Valley funded military startups. This means the ecosystem is now profiting off of war, suffering, war crimes, and human death. What we need is startups focusing on peace and diplomacy. That solves way more problems in a net positive manner.
      • Arubis 1 hour ago
        The irony of your username is not lost on me.

        That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.

      • dylan604 34 minutes ago
        The industrial military complex is doing just fine thank you very much.
      • libertine 1 hour ago
        What do you suggest for Ukraine? What's their alternative if they don't want to be forced to become a Belarus?
      • cindyllm 1 hour ago
        [dead]
  • RomanPushkin 38 minutes ago
    Should we call it "Yandex experiment" from now on? Because it seems like the experiment didn't go well:

    April 27, 2020:

    "Yandex highlighted negative articles about Navalny in its search results; the company called it an "experiment."

    https://zona-media.translate.goog/news/2020/04/27/navyandex?...

  • arpinum 2 hours ago
    Seems like a mistake to stagger these hits, doing both in the same hour could have taken out backups before they had a chance to replicate elsewhere.
    • SXX 2 hours ago
      Russia dont have that many large datacenters and replacing them is both damn hard and expensive.

      Also unlike in Ukraine local organizations are required to run on infrastructure inside country by law and even major peering points are very centralised. Connections between Russia and other countries are even more centralised.

      So it doesnt matter in what order datacenters going to be destroyed. Ukraine just need to take down enough of them.

    • chmod775 1 hour ago
      There's little difference between 1 hour and 48 hours when it comes to the amount of data in question here.
    • HarHarVeryFunny 1 hour ago
      A lot of the smaller drones that Ukraine is using only do limited damage - they may start a fire than can spread, but not doing to destroy an entire larger facility (although the Flamingo can do significant damage). Many Russian energy facilities just get hit repeatedly over time - Russia will fix as fast as they can. Staggering hits seems to make sense.
      • Scoundreller 18 minutes ago
        Energy facilities have the destructive energy stockpiled on-site. Don't need to fly in much force yourself.

        Also why I think governments should mass-produce & subsidize blow-molded 25L plastic gas cans instead of building centralized storage tanks/caverns. No way those things cost anywhere near US$25 to make.

      • cma 1 hour ago
        There are chemical based emp bombs, NNEMPs, if the penetrate through to the inside and set that off it seems like it would be pretty effective on datacenters.
    • bbor 2 hours ago
      To be clear, it seems like two different datacenters, and the first attack alone seems to have been wildly successful already, burning down ~1/3rd of the entire building (!!!). Some of the reported outages:

        The most serious disruptions were reported in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where users also experienced problems with T-Bank, internet provider SkyNet, and the Mango Office cloud service... Yandex Disk, Yandex Documents, and other company services... online bus-ticket sales in the Moscow region [via] MosTransAvto... Several major Russian media websites, including RBC, RIA Novosti, Kommersant, Vedomosti, Interfax, and Vesti... Russian Railways...
      
      And all that's before this attack. We'll see what the extent is, I guess.

      So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public and general economy, which is the main way they'll advance a war against a country they are forbidden from invading to any semi-meaningful degree (due to nukes). Permenantly destroying data would be nice, sure, but service interruption is already such a huge win that it'd be a marginal improvement only, IMHO.

      That is, unless there are cloud-native banks without backups, which... yikes! Possible, I suppose?

      • SXX 1 hour ago
        Russia started to very actively hit Ukraine datacanters a month ago. So everyone sane likely had some backups by now because they knew this is going to happen.
        • Aozora7 56 minutes ago
          Ukraine has backups and redundancy in allied countries. Russia has been doing the opposite recently, trying to reduce their dependence on foreign infrastructure, which now bites them in the ass since it concentrates them into a small number of physical locations in strike range of Ukraine.
        • ceejayoz 1 hour ago
          Backups with nowhere to restore to don’t do you much good.
          • SXX 1 hour ago
            They just re-host it on chinese clouds. Most of european part of russia dont have mobile internet for years now and it did not change much for people living there.

            Adding 200ms of latency wont affect anyone living much and China will happily sell datacenter capacity to it's vassal state.

            • Scoundreller 16 minutes ago
              coming soon on alibaba: data-centre-specific bomber drones, sales to all parties, no questions asked!
      • ndom91 37 minutes ago
        Did I just read that Russia has a local ISP called "SkyNet"? :joy:
    • tokai 1 hour ago
      Backups don't matter at all if you can destroy the hardware. Yandex is not rebuilding this at meaningful price, and if they do Ukrainians just burn it down again.
    • bpodgursky 2 hours ago
      Taking out GPUs is more important than storage nowdays.
      • jameshart 1 hour ago
        Replacing the RAM is going to be expensive
  • thinkcontext 2 hours ago
    Interesting to see this and the targeting of data centers in the Middle East. Its critical infrastructure and a hit gets the attacker a lot of bang for the buck in terms of economic damage.
    • bayindirh 2 hours ago
      From what I see, these are the "tit" part of the "tit for tat" strategy. Neither Ukraine, nor Iran targeted these in the beginning, however when other side started to escalate, both replied by attacking more critical infrastructure for the other party.
      • idontwantthis 1 hour ago
        Ukraine has been at war for 4 years. They didn’t have the capability to hit Russia this hard and deep until fairly recently. These are mostly home grown weapons developed during the war.
        • bayindirh 1 hour ago
          That's true, however they don't use this capability like it's infinite. They only utilize this when Russia does something similar or plans of doing something similar leaks.

          I'm not a fan of wars, regardless of where they happen. OTOH, I still believe you can fight relatively clean or be an unethical bully. If the war is unavoidable, I prefer to be the former.

          I also commend Ukraine's ingenuity and bravery, as well.

        • ifwinterco 1 hour ago
          Still not necessarily wise to voluntarily escalate an air war when you have very little air defence. But hey what do I know
          • senderista 14 minutes ago
            Exactly, long-range drone attack capability is an asymmetric advantage for Ukraine only relative to their other capabilities, not relative to Russia. Russia can easily make Kyiv unlivable, as they are just starting to do.
      • HarHarVeryFunny 1 hour ago
        I seem to recall that this is optimal game theoretic strategy - don't initiate, but always immediately retaliate.

        Whatever is happening now is payback for Putin's birthday present to himself from 2 days ago, firing a missile into a Ukrainian apartment building that killed 22 civilians (mostly women & children).

        • senderista 12 minutes ago
          I think the Wildberries strikes were a unilateral escalation on the part of Ukraine and the current escalation cycle has ensued from that.
        • 4729738210 1 hour ago
          Would you have preferred it if more men had been killed?
          • ForHackernews 1 hour ago
            The man have been conscripted into the military to fight against an invasion of their homeland.
      • dizhn 1 hour ago
        I heard from friends that a lot Ukraine's large distribution centers were also hit lately after Ukraine hit Russia's.

        I haven't seen any site I frequent mention this once. The PR bubble is very real.

        • olexsmir 1 hour ago
          Russia has been hitting civilian logistics centers for years now. At least 2 of my packages were destroyed :C
        • stickfigure 1 hour ago
          That's because it's nonsense. Russia has been targeting Ukrainian civilian logistics for years.
        • tokai 1 hour ago
          You frequent bad sites then. Don't make a conspiracy based on your own bad media consumption.
  • drewg123 1 hour ago
    How effective are the western embargos? Will it be possible for them to replace destroyed hardware?
    • ACCount39 1 hour ago
      Will it be possible? Yes. Will it be easy, or cheap? No.

      As is often the case, embargoes don't make things impossible - but they do add friction. Longer lead times, "grey market partner" premiums. People who supply Russian companies with hardware get to pad their pockets - and while they have ties in Russia, for obvious reasons, they prefer to keep those padded pockets outside Russia itself.

      It's even worse for bleeding edge in-demand extra-controlled hardware like modern AI systems.

    • bayindirh 1 hour ago
      I use ARM VPSes for quite some time and they are pretty performant. They don't have to replace with x86 systems. Linux on ARM is pretty mature and production ready at this point.
      • drewg123 1 hour ago
        Seems like GPUs and RAM/NAND are the problem, and that's a common problem for arm64 and x86
        • Scoundreller 10 minutes ago
          my Arm/Android set-top box of choice for, ahem, streaming subscriptions, is up 50% in price despite no changes to the design since I bought it 2 years ago. And that's on aliexpress where margins are limited.
        • bayindirh 1 hour ago
          I don't know the hardware inside the data center, and it might not be a "AI" data center to begin with. NAND is a big problem, but DDR4 memory is not AFAICS, and if you need CPU power for serving stuff, getting it is easy.

          If you need high performance or AI operations... GLHF!

    • biesnecker 1 hour ago
      China is not part of the embargo, so I suspect commodity server and networking hardware isn't hard to come by.
      • SXX 1 hour ago
        Problem is that RAM and disk manufacturing capacity is all sold out years ahead. Yandex while being largest IT company in Russia have nowhere near the money to compete with AI hyperscalers.

        Nebius which is basically was out-of-Russia part Yandex is now larger than what left of Yandex in Russia.

    • tryauuum 1 hour ago
      great question, I don't have a good answer. supposedly there are gpus, here you can rent a H200 (a GPU which was released after the war had started) https://selectel.ru/services/dedicated/hgx-h200/

      But how many of them exist and how easy is to replace, I have no idea

    • brianwawok 1 hour ago
      Computers aint cheap right now off the shelf. Can't imagine the embargo busting surcharge.
    • HackerThemAll 1 hour ago
      It'll be much harder to replace lost data than destroyed hardware.
  • elmer2 35 minutes ago
    Ukraine also hit Russian oil refineries. The EU buys lots of Russian oil....
  • nixass 1 hour ago
    Nebius Slack channels going wild now
  • nalekberov 42 minutes ago
    If only Ukraine could understand that it is actually doing Russian citizens a favor.
  • WarmWash 1 hour ago
    What is a Russian citizen supposed to do? I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine, as now they have tangible "evidence" that maybe Putin was right all along.

    The ideal is turning on Putin, but what does that even look like? The guy has 9 layers of isolation, a carefully curated and frequently culled leadership, and a robust propaganda department.

    So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?

    • squidbeak 1 hour ago
      > So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?

      It seems to have somehow escaped your notice that Russia has been storming Ukraine for almost 5 years.

      • WarmWash 24 minutes ago
        But not with widespread public support...

        There is a (massive) difference between soldiers there to get a paycheck, and soldiers there to avenge their communities.

        • stasgavrylov 17 minutes ago
          its much more widespread than you think
          • WarmWash 8 minutes ago
            The only ones I know are the older timers with rosy soviet glasses. Young people, the ones who would do the actual fighting, seem to have incredibly low support for it.
      • TiredOfLife 39 minutes ago
        12 years
    • Aozora7 47 minutes ago
      Russians won't storm anything, but if you observe their actual behavior, it's easy to see that they don't attribute their problems to Ukraine. No one is volunteering to go fight there without very high signup bonuses and salaries.

      Russians may believe a lot of bullshit from TV, but when it comes to decisions that impact their own life, they act surprisingly rationally, and become very skeptical of anything the government says.

    • PestoDiRucola 41 minutes ago
      > What is a Russian citizen supposed to do?

      Who cares. Their government started this, and by all accounts most of their population supports, or is indifferent to it. They made their bed and they can now lie in it.

      > So at the breaking point, will Russians storm the capital or storm Ukraine?

      They've been storming Ukraine for the past 4 years now.

      • Kinrany 27 minutes ago
        As of the last election, judging by actual votes cast, only a third of the country isn't opposed to the war.
        • timmytokyo 12 minutes ago
          I hate to break it to you, but about those elections...
    • binlog 1 hour ago
      > I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine

      As opposed to right now where they are the best of friends?

      • WarmWash 21 minutes ago
        Most Russians see the war as Putins war and have zero animosity towards Ukrainians.

        So my fear is that Ukraine attacking Russian societal pillars will begin to manifest animosity.

    • 1970-01-01 1 hour ago
      The problem is Russians are too afraid to turn on their motherland because "reasons" but that is exactly what has to happen to end the war. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it.
      • tryauuum 1 hour ago
        Americans are so naive about the "turn on their motherland" part. It's not really a reply to you, I just remembered some american whom I met and he was treating us as kids, saying things as "alone you are weak but together you are strong!"

        yes if you could magically organize 10_000 people they could overthrow anyone. But organizing is hard. Starting from a fact that they need some secure comminution channel, and the government fights VPN quite actively. How would you reach these potential people? You could do sort of broadcast a public message "if you don't like tsar let's take a walk tomorrow" but this signal would also be received by the police, so they can prepare. And we don't have the beautiful gun ownership culture of America.

        And if you do something alone you just perish in prison.

      • TrueRider 45 minutes ago
        This comment same for:

        "The problem is that Europeans are too afraid to turn on their motherland "reasons," but that is exactly what has to happen to end to illegal migration. Hard to take medicine is indeed hard to take at first, but things are not getting better without it."

    • rjsw 1 hour ago
      Prigozhin had the chance to do something but bottled out.
    • renyicircle 1 hour ago
      > I fear most Russians will just turn on Ukraine

      In which ways does the situation where "most Russians turn on Ukraine" differ from the current reality?

    • olexsmir 1 hour ago
      I think you missed the news, war is going on for 5 years already, and yet russians don't do jack shit about it
    • libertine 1 hour ago
      They could take accountability and face the consequences of resigning for their country responsibilities.

      Yet they closed their eyes to everything, from the destruction of freedom of press, to corruption, even to political alternatives not being allowed, even to the war.

    • stickfigure 1 hour ago
      Ask Nicholas II.
    • speransky 1 hour ago
      Russian citizens have no voice anyway, so their opinion isn’t a part of equation about strikes planning. 90% of them support aggression anyway
    • darkwi11ow 1 hour ago
      There are two points to answer this question. First is that the majority of russian population supports the war, and the number of russians that are anti-war now but can become supporters of an aggression as results of these strikes is negligible.

      Second, the opinion of citizen does not count in russia anyway. It is an opinion of oligarchs and people in control that matters. Putin and his cronies are in their 70s and will go away soon. Whoever replaces the fuhrer and his clique needs to understand that messing with Ukraine is very costly affair. The more destruction is unleashed on russia now, the less bellirigent it will be in the future.

    • cmrdporcupine 1 hour ago
      "For the love of god, won't somebody think of the oppressor?!"
    • AlienRobot 1 hour ago
      What are you talking about? Russians are at war with Ukraine. Putin isn't the one marching and operating the tanks.
      • TrueRider 39 minutes ago
        No, it's only the government's fault. Citizens are not complicit in the war, they need to be completely separated.
    • Grollicus 1 hour ago
      The war has public support in russia, even though russia is trying to genocide ukrainians (see Bucha). How much more can they "turn on Ukraine"?
      • pphysch 1 hour ago
        How come no more "Buchas" happened in the war? How come the only "Bucha" happened after Russia withdrew in anticipation of a peace agreement that was heavily opposed by UK and others?

        After Nord Stream, we all know what those maniacs are capable of.

        • krior 41 minutes ago
          How many settlemens still inhabited by Ukrainians has Russion controlled in the last couple of years? How many of those were liberated?
        • Grollicus 50 minutes ago
          Just look at the wikipedia article, it has multiple independent credible sources naming russians as the perpetrators.
          • TrueRider 37 minutes ago
            The whole wikipedia is censored, there are no DIFFERENT opinions there. You're a victim of propaganda
            • libertine 8 minutes ago
              Isn't there enough independent sources and reputable organizations in the Wikipedia article with facts, not opinions?

              Or you're going to okay the card that every organization is in cahoots in the big American conspiracy to control the world?

              Could it be that it's maybe you the victim of propaganda?

        • libertine 54 minutes ago
          Tragically a lot Buchas happened[0], and there's plenty of videos of civilian executions - God only knows what atrocities are yet to be discovered in occupied territories.

          All for some messed up sense of ethnic superiority.

          [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russo-Ukrain...

        • 4729738210 1 hour ago
          [flagged]
  • pftburger 2 hours ago
    Am I the only one thinking just blurring the site is a little naive? It's relatively trivial to extrapolate the centers of the blobs from a blur. Pretty strange thing picking up a ticket to obfuscate your company's data centers on the map to protect them against drone attacks and then kind of just phoning it in
  • pi-rat 1 hour ago
    Imagine when something hits us-east-1 as part of the opening shot of a major future conflict..
    • Zigurd 31 minutes ago
      The way it actually works is that the Russians will hire a disposable agent, pay them in crypto, and incite them to commit arson or a bombing.
    • binlog 1 hour ago
      If a foreign nation gets the capabilty to directly strike US soil we are way past worrying about us-east-1
      • 9cb14c1ec0 1 hour ago
        Unless they are dumb, there are foreign nations that have sleeper agents with stockpiles of drone hidden on US soil.
        • pi-rat 1 hour ago
          I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s shipping containers or even privately owned houses, filled with optically controlled or autonomous drones, sitting near high value infrastructure around the world. Mirroring those Ukrainian trucks.
          • Zigurd 29 minutes ago
            You don't need to guess about that. To the extent it's doable, the Russians are doing grey zone warfare in Europe.
    • hiddencost 1 hour ago
      us-east-1 is located close to the NSA and a huge fraction of the American military and intelligence apparatus. And Washington, D.C.

      It's probably one of the safest places on the planet.

  • outside1234 1 hour ago
    They should consider withdrawing from Ukraine
  • RIMR 49 minutes ago
    "United24Media" is mostly just Ukrainian military propaganda. I wouldn't trust it given some of their other articles.

    Here's a better source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...

  • cyanydeez 2 hours ago
    someone go correlate whether this leads to a drop in bot/AI traffic.
  • mouldloft 2 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • secondary_op 1 hour ago
    [flagged]