A Ukrainian drone attack knocked a Russian data center offline Sunday, as data centers emerge as increasingly attractive targets in war.
Russia and Ukraine have traded strikes on digital infrastructure in recent weeks, triggering major outages on both sides; Ukrainian strikes also prompted Russian bot traffic to plummet.
While such attacks are not unprecedented — Iranian strikes hit data centers in Bahrain and the UAE earlier this year — their fallout reaches far beyond the battlefield, disrupting the services civilians and businesses rely on.
“Modern warfare no longer discriminates between military targets and commercial infrastructure,” an analyst for The National Interest wrote, suggesting firms embrace “reasonable self-protection measures” in response.