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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Attack on Sber's data center in Balakovo: Russians complain of outages in online services
In Russia, users report outages in Sberbank apps and the Tochnaya Bank service, the Samokat grocery delivery service, and a number of other online platforms. Complaints appeared 14 in October, after a drone attack on Sber’s data center in Balakovo, Saratov region. At the same time, the bank itself stated that its systems are operating in normal mode, and a direct link between the attack and outages in third-party services is not confirmed.
Russian media report user complaints citing monitoring services Detector404 and Sboy.rf.
According to these data, Tochnaya Bank customers complained about online banking and the Business Online service. Sberbank reported problems with the app and the website, as well as with the operation of the neural network GigaChat. Outages allegedly affected the Samokat grocery delivery service, Mail.ru cloud storage, and other digital platforms, including Kontur.
The Ekspert publication reported a sharp rise in complaints about Mail.ru: according to its data, the number of appeals reached about 1,5 thousand per hour and 8,8 thousand per day. At the same time, reports about problems across various services do not in themselves prove that all of them were caused by a single incident.
What is known about the attack on the data center
According to Russian media, drones attacked Sber’s data center in Balakovo during the night of 14 October. Alexander Vedya kin, the first deputy chairman of the bank's board, confirmed the attack but said that all Sberbank systems and services are operating normally. According to him, employees were not harmed.
Forbes reports that Saratov region governor Roman Busargin stated that several residential buildings were damaged as a result of the Balakovo attack and one person died. In his words, city infrastructure facilities continued to operate.
Earlier it was reported that the data center was planned to house Russia’s most powerful supercomputer. Russian state agency TASS wrote about these plans in 2024 year.
Not the first incident involving Russian data centers
The attack on Sber’s facility came amid reports of prior strikes on Yan d e x data center infrastructure. According to Forbes, drones hit three of six large data centers of the company, after which its services experienced outages.
Data centers provide the operation of banking platforms, cloud storage, corporate systems, and other digital services. Therefore, disruptions to their operation can affect the accessibility of services used by millions of people and companies.
As a reminder, attacks on Yandex data centers paralyzed part of the services: restoration could take up to half a year.
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