Russia targets Ukraine's data centers. Why the country's internet is hard to knock offline

On the afternoon of Sept. 25, explosions shook Kyiv's Solomianskyi district. Near the Shuliavska metro station, burned-out cars stood amid shattered glass, and the body of a young woman lay near the entrance to an underground passage.

Nearby, a Russian strike had hit a building housing a data center - for the second time that day.

DataGroup, the telecommunications company operating the facility, said none of its employees were injured and customer data remained intact. Services continued from backup sites.

The attack was part of a series of Russian strikes on the physical infrastructure underpinning Ukraine's digital networks. Since Sept. 23, damaged data centers have left around 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding region with internet disruptions, knocked public services offline and affected television broadcasts and streaming platforms.

The effects have also traveled far beyond the sites of the strikes. Public transport information displays stopped working in Lutsk, hundreds of kilometers from Kyiv, because services there relied on infrastructure hosted in the capital.

Russia's Defense Ministry has since openly acknowledged targeting communications infrastructure and named data centers operated by Omega Telecom and Kyivstar among its targets, claiming they provided services to the Ukrainian military. It did not provide evidence for those claims.

In an image accompanying one of its statements, the ministry depicted a drone flying over flames under the words "Digital detox" and added: "By force."

Yet damaging a data center does not mean switching off Ukraine's internet. The country's networks are distributed across numerous facilities and routes, allowing traffic to be redirected when individual nodes fail. After more than four years of full-scale war, operators have also built layers of backup connections, power supplies and equipment.

That redundancy has limits - and a growing price.

So what exactly happens when Russia hits a data center? Why can an attack in Kyiv disrupt services hundreds of kilometers away? And how much damage would it take to knock a Ukrainian city - or the country - offline?

What happens when a data center goes down?

A data center is more than a building filled with servers. It can host equipment belonging to multiple companies, along with network connections, power systems and other infrastructure that keeps their services running.

That means physical damage to a single facility can affect several providers - and users who may be nowhere near the site of the attack.

For an ordinary internet user, the result can range from slower or unstable connections to a complete loss of service. Businesses can lose access to phone systems, payment processing, cloud services, internal networks or other tools they rely on to operate.

The disruption following recent Russian strikes has provided a real-world example.

After attacks damaged data center infrastructure on Sept. 23, around 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding region experienced internet problems. Kyiv's digital services were also affected: public transport tracking and electronic displays at stops became unavailable, while some municipal services were temporarily disrupted.

The effects did not stop at Kyiv.

In Lutsk, a city in western Ukraine hundreds of kilometers away, electronic public transport displays stopped working on Sept. 25. Local authorities said the disruption was caused by attacks on data centers in Kyiv.

The reason is that the service a person uses in one city does not necessarily run on equipment located there.

Internet traffic and digital services travel through networks of servers and communication nodes that may be located in different cities or even different countries, Volodymyr Fursevych, technical director at communications systems company Adaptis, told hromadske.

When one part of that network fails, traffic can usually be redirected through another route. But the alternative route needs enough spare capacity to handle the additional load. Without it, users may experience slower connections, unstable service or outages even far from the damaged infrastructure.

The same vulnerability became visible after Russian strikes on Kyiv data center operator Cosmonova on Sept. 25 and 26.

Cosmonova later said one of its data centers, which hosted servers belonging to multiple companies, had stopped operating after the attacks and that access to the facility was restricted even for technical staff.

Disruptions then appeared across Ukraine's media infrastructure. Several television channels temporarily lost their signals, while users of streaming services MEGOGO and SWEET.TV also reported problems. MEGOGO's support service said a Russian attack had damaged a data center operated by its main partner supplying television signals.

Parts of Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne's website temporarily lost video playback, while Army TV and other broadcasters also reported interruptions linked to the strikes.

In other words, knocking out one physical location can produce failures across seemingly unrelated services — and hundreds of kilometers away.

But the same structure that allows those failures to spread also helps explain why taking down Ukraine's entire internet is a much harder task.

Why Ukraine's internet is hard to knock offline

Ukraine's internet does not depend on a single data center, network or route. Its infrastructure is distributed, and operators can redirect traffic when individual connections or facilities are damaged.

That redundancy has become increasingly important during years of Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy and telecommunications infrastructure.

Ukrainian operators generally maintain backup connections and equipment, although the level of protection varies between networks, Fursevych said. When one route fails, another can take over - provided it has enough capacity and the equipment and power needed to keep it running.

But simply having two internet connections does not necessarily provide true redundancy.

Two providers may use the same physical cable, share network equipment or depend on the same power source. If that common point fails, both connections can disappear at once.

For critical services, Fursevych recommends combining conventional internet connections with independent backup systems such as Starlink. Satellite internet can remain available when local telecommunications infrastructure is damaged, but it is not a complete solution on its own: terminals still need backup power, access to open sky and a tested plan for switching over when the primary connection fails.

Serhii Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian defense technology adviser known by the call sign Flash, has similarly argued that the distributed structure of Ukraine's networks makes a nationwide internet blackout unlikely.

Individual providers can experience outages and users in particular areas may temporarily lose service, he said, but taking an entire city, region or the country offline is far more difficult because internet connectivity is spread across multiple channels.

Even several successful strikes, Fursevych said, would be unlikely to shut down internet access across Ukraine.

The more realistic risk is a patchwork of local or regional outages, slower speeds and overloaded surviving networks as traffic is pushed onto fewer available routes.

How quickly service returns depends on what exactly was damaged. A power failure may be resolved relatively quickly, while destroyed cables, network equipment or an inaccessible data center can take much longer to repair. Operators with spare equipment, alternative routes and functioning backup sites can restore services faster.

The result is a system designed not to be indestructible, but to keep working when parts of it are destroyed.

And maintaining that resilience is becoming increasingly expensive.

The price of staying online

Keeping Ukraine connected increasingly means paying for infrastructure that may never be needed under normal conditions.

Operators are likely to further decentralize critical systems, spreading equipment across multiple locations so that the loss of one site does not take services down with it. They also need spare equipment, backup power supplies and alternative network connections that can take over when primary systems fail.

All of that costs money.

Oleksandr Poliudov, owner of Ukrainian telecommunications company UTELS, expects internet access to become more expensive as providers invest in making their networks more resilient.

Providers that are buying backup power systems and maintaining alternative communication channels are already struggling to keep monthly internet prices at around 300–350 hryvnias ($7–$8), he said.

For businesses, resilience carries its own costs. Companies need to identify which services are essential, maintain genuinely independent backup connections and regularly test whether those backups actually work when the primary system fails.

The same logic increasingly applies to the infrastructure itself. Distributing critical equipment across geographically separate sites makes networks harder to disable with individual strikes - but also makes them more expensive to build and operate.

Russia's attacks have therefore created a continuing trade-off for Ukraine's digital infrastructure: every additional layer of redundancy makes the system harder to knock offline, while increasing the cost of keeping it running.

For now, experts see local outages, slower connections and temporary disruptions as a much more realistic threat than a nationwide blackout.

Ukraine's internet may not have a single switch Russia can turn off. Keeping it that way, however, requires constantly building another route, another backup and another way around the damage.