Russian Yandex Data Centers Destroyed and Cause Outages - Disaster Recovery Goes to WAR

Eli the Computer Guy (0:00)

Coming from CNBC, Russia's internet giant Yandex halts operations at major data center after drone attack. So it does appear that the favorite game for 2026 is no longer pickleball, it is plinking data centers. Remember when I used to talk about plinking data centers and my viewers used to say I was being mellow, dramatic, and all of that kind of stuff?

Yeah, I remember those days. There's a reason I try to talk about the things that I do in these particular videos. There's a reason I get very frustrated when CEOs look at me and think I'm a jackass sometimes. Because don't get me wrong, I am a jackass. And I'm a jackass with a point. I'm a jackass with a point. So we've been seeing a lot of plinking of data centers lately, right? So in the Middle East, we saw Iran plinking AWS data centers, Bahrain, and the UAE apparently did so much damage to the data centers there, that data is now permanently gone. It is interesting to start looking at what happened to AWS. So AWS, basically for resiliency, for fault tolerance, that type of thing, there's replication. So data gets replicated. The curious thing, though, is for how Amazon builds their architectures, is they have different regions. So all around the world, there's all these different regions. And so from a resiliency standpoint, what's happened is data is replicated within the region. So the idea is if one rack of servers fail, right, that's fine, because things have replicated in the rest of the region. Even if a data center goes down, even if a data center goes down, right, of multiple data centers within that region, the data still should be okay because it's replicated throughout the region.

Holy hell, it appears that basically the damage done by the IRGC against the AWS data centers is it took so many data centers offline in Bahrain and UAE for that particular region, that even though the data had replicated out, if basically, if this server rack goes boom, and the server rack where the data got replicated to goes boom, and the server rack where it got backed up to goes boom, then even if you have the best replication strategy in the world, if all of your replication servers get clinked, it's not going to matter, right? And so we saw that going on. We've seen this now in Ukraine. So Russia is stepping up their missile attacks and their attacks on Ukraine going after a lot of their data centers, right? The idea there is for the communication infrastructure. If you can plink the data centers for the main telco companies and that type of thing, you can try to crash the communications within Ukraine, and that will be of military benefit. So now Ukraine is turning around, and like, well, if you want to plink our data centers, we can plink your data centers. And so they've gone after a Yandex. Yandex is like the Google. Like, you hear this, like, wild berries. Wild berries is like the Amazon of Russia. Yandex is like the Google of Russia. And so Ukraine has decided to start plinking those, and it seems to be causing a lot of problems. So this is gonna be something interesting going into the future, because so much of the infrastructure that we've built out in the modern world simply has not been designed to deal with wartime scenarios. It is interesting, right? I'm a veteran, my father's a veteran. His father is a veteran. His father was a veteran. We've been veterans all the way back to well before World War I. And the curious thing is, when I was growing up as a kid, again, my stepfather, he retired out of the Navy. His father retired, right? And one of the interesting things is when I was growing up, I was always around people who had served. To one degree or another, all the men that I was around had served in the military, had served generally during wartime, and they understood the concept of violence to one degree or the other. I think one of the interesting things is, as I've grown up and as I've become older, now that I'm over 50 now, is that nobody serves in the military anymore. It's weird. That's the thing, when I was younger, everybody, everybody, at least everybody, I was around and served or had some experience in the military. If they hadn't served, it's because their eyeballs were shot to shit or whatever else. But there was like this thing, like people under, at least had the grasp of warfare. I think what's kind of fascinating now is we're in 2026, especially in the United States, is the number of Americans, living Americans who have served in the military is like insanely small. It's like an incredibly small percentage point of the American population has actually served in the military. And what I think is kind of interesting there is again, when you start thinking about things like our technology infrastructure. So I got into technology again, I started in the US Army in the 90s, as an electronics repair person. And so you take the initial mindset, you take the skill sets from wherever you start learning technology into the rest of your career. Like one of the things I've talked about for years at this point, is things like counterintelligence operations. A day ago, I talked with start up companies, you've seen me interview CEOs, and I'll be like, what are your counterintelligence capabilities? And they giggle at me, fucking giggle at me. And like one of the reasons that I think about this kind of stuff is because that was, that was what was hammered into my fucking head, need to know and all of that kind of stuff. And what I think is interesting is we have this whole generation of technology professionals. And again, we talk about technology professionals. We're not just talking about the shitty ass little node developers, right? We're talking about the people that build the architectures, do all of that kind of stuff.