Russians locked out of bank accounts and apartments as Ukraine hits data centers

From accessing their money to ordering a taxi or takeout — millions of Russians were feeling the impact of Ukrainian strikes on the data centers of the country’s internet giant Yandex in their daily life. “I ended up in a situation where I had absolutely no money. Well, I had the money, but it was inaccessible,” said Irina, a blogger from St. Petersburg, who had not been able to access her money for four days when she spoke with NBC News last week. Irina, who like several other interviewees did not want her last name shared while speaking with a foreign news organization on a sensitive matter, said her rent was due the day the first outages happened, when she hoped “that it would be fixed in a few hours.” Days later, she still had no access to money to pay for utilities or even food for her small child. The strikes that took place over several days earlier this month were the first publicized attacks on Russian data centers as Ukraine seeks to bring the war home for Russians. The disruption hit a myriad of services provided by Yandex, a tech giant akin to Google whose services are deeply integrated into daily life in Russia, and whose digital infrastructure is relied on by other third-party platforms. Many people took to social media to complain about not being able to order a taxi or food delivery. Others reported not being able to access their files on the company’s storage service, while some even struggled to get into their homes after their digital keys went offline. While most Yandex services have been coming back online, three people told NBC News they had been left locked out of their disposable cash and savings for days after disruptions to Yandex Pay, a digital payment service that many Russians use. Irina, 21, said that in the future she will diversify her deposits across different banks and have a “substantial cash reserve” just in case. Yandex said Oct. 9 that no employees were hurt and that the company is working to restore service. “Data centers are the iron heart of Yandex,” the statement said. “Their operation is critical for services that have become part of people’s everyday lives.” Anastasiya Mityaeva, 25, who splits her time between the southern city of Krasnodar and Moscow, said she was “shocked” by the outages, which initially left her family worried about being able to pay down their mortgage after her account, her mother’s account and her grandmother’s account were all inaccessible. “The uncertainty was scary,” said Mityaeva, who has two million followers on TikTok and is originally from Russian-annexed Crimea. “We realized just how much hangs on Yandex. We did not quite appreciate it before,” she added. Mityaeva, who regained access to her money after several days, also had issues calling a taxi on the first day of the outages, and encountered problems with the system to enter her apartment building. Her Yandex home voice assistant, equivalent to an Amazon Echo, stopped responding to requests to play music and turn off the lights. She did not blame the company, saying Yandex was a “hostage of the situation,” adding: “I understand that this was not up to them, this came from the outside.” Others were more critical of the company. Viktoria, a 30-year-old barista from Moscow, said she plans to stop using Yandex completely after being unable to access her money during the outages, describing it as the last straw after other recent issues. She said Saturday that she once again had access to her money through Yandex Pay, but said the service was displaying the wrong balance on her account. Three taxi drivers in Moscow, who use Yandex’s taxi application to take orders and get paid, all told NBC News they couldn’t see how much money they were making and could not withdraw their earnings during the outage. One of the drivers said he has stopped working altogether until the problem gets fixed. He was originally from Kyrgyzstan and did not know why the outages were happening. Another driver, Valery from Krasnodar, had only been on the job for a few months, having previously worked at a packing center for Wildberries, Russia’s retail giant, whose warehouse was attacked by Ukrainian drones in July. When the Yandex outages started, he said the taxi app would show error messages or even send several cars for the same customer. While that has been largely resolved, Valery said the biggest issue for him was that he couldn’t withdraw the money that he had already earned with Yandex. “If I can’t access my pay in another week or two, I will start looking for another job,” Valery, 24, said. In addition to Yandex, the data centers of Russia’s biggest bank Sberbank and tech giant VK have also been targeted in recent days. That chaos is no accident, analysts say. “Ukraine’s campaign from the start has had as one of its objectives bringing home to ordinary Russians the fact that they are at war, and this involves consequences,” Keir Giles, an associate fellow at Chatham House, told NBC News. The aim, Giles said, is for everyday Russians to conclude that their lives are being disrupted because of their leaders’ actions in waging war. Yandex may also be a target because of its role in shaping what Russians see online, said Robert Tollast, a drone expert and researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London. Data centers also have growing military value, Tollast added, as both sides use battlefield data to improve operations and commanders’ situational awareness, potentially with AI-assisted planning. Asked about the outages and whether the government was looking into financially assisting those affected, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was premature to talk about government support because Yandex is “facing difficulties,” but is “strong and powerful.” Meanwhile, Russian authorities were looking at protecting data centers after the “unprecedented attack,” said Minister of Digital Development Maksut Shadayev. On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin held a meeting on enhancing the level of digital security in Russia, but Peskov said it was not linked to the attacks on data centers. Russia has increasingly ramped up its own attacks on Ukrainian data centers, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accusing Moscow of trying to “leave Ukrainians without the internet.” Ukraine was reciprocating those strikes by hitting Yandex, he said in a speech last week, adding without providing evidence that “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms” because there were fewer Russian bots around. NBC News could not verify if Yandex services going down had that effect. While both sides have hit data centers, Russia’s were an easier target, said Mykhailo Samus, a Ukrainian military analyst and director of the New Geopolitics Research Network. While Ukraine’s data centers are widely dispersed, many of Russia’s are concentrated in a handful of large facilities, he said, meaning a strike on a single site can disrupt services spanning transport, internet access and payments. “Very easy and very important,” he said.