Ukrainian drones hit Sberbank data center in Russia; users report service outages

Ukrainian drones attacked a data center of Sberbank, Russia's largest bank, in the city of Balakovo in the Saratov region overnight on October 14. Afterward, customers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, the Novosibirsk region and other regions began reporting problems. The effects could reach a wide range of users, as the bank is one of the country's key payment service providers.

According to the outage-monitoring sites Sboi.rf and Downdetector, the number of users complaining has risen sharply. People say online banking is not working, payments are not going through, the bank's website will not load and the mobile app will not open.

Problems at other services

Outages were also recorded at other sites and services: Mail.ru, Kontur, Ozon, MegaFon and VKontakte, as well as the St. Petersburg internet provider SkyNet. The source does not say whether these disruptions are directly linked to the attack on the Sberbank data center.

Sberbank First Deputy Chairman Alexander Vedyakhin confirmed that the attack took place, but said all of the bank's services were operating normally.

Earlier strikes

Last week, Ukraine's armed forces struck data centers belonging to Yandex, a Russian technology company, three times. After the third strike, users across Russia began experiencing problems with Yandex's own services and with many other websites. Yandex services abroad, in Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Serbia, also stopped working or suffered disruptions.