Ukrainian data center firm GigaCenter has seen its facility in Kyiv taken out by Russian attacks.

Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, have struck two telecommunications facilities in Russian-occupied territory

GigaCenter data center in Kyiv hit

It is the latest facility damaged or destroyed in a series of ongoing attacks against digital infrastructure in Russia and Ukraine.

The facility was struck yesterday afternoon (Tuesday, October 20), and appears to be permanently disabled. GigaCenter’s website is currently offline at the time of writing.

“On October 20, as a result of a Russian strike, the GigaCenter data center was critically damaged and disabled,” the company said in a post to social media. “All our employees are targeted. However, unfortunately, we are forced to stop our work indefinitely.”

GigaCenter operates a single data center in Kyiv, built to Tier III standards. The 1,200 sqm facility has a total IT whitespace of 550 sqm (5,920 sq ft) and capacity for around 300 racks. The site opened in 2014. Some online sources list the facility as located at Vasylkivska St, 37B in the southwest of the city.

The company is part of GigaGroup, which was founded in 2006 and includes telco GigaTrans, cybersecurity firm GigaSafe, and cloud operator GigaCloud.

In its own post, GigaCloud said: “Yesterday, a Russian strike damaged one of the data centers hosting GigaCloud’s cloud services. All our clients’ services continue to operate normally on backup decentralized sites in Ukraine and the EU.”

GigaCloud says it operates out of five data centers in the European Union, relying on colocation providers such as Equinix (WA3 in Warsaw, Poland), Atman (Warsaw), and Talex. The company is also an OVH partner. According to its website, the company also has capacity in BeMobile’s data center in Kyiv and another facility in Lviv.

GigaTrans said: “One of the root nodes of the GigaTrans network was damaged. Thanks to geographical redundancy and reliable duplication of network elements, all GigaTrans services continue to work and are provided in full. The main thing is that our employees were not injured and are safe.”

Ukraine forces target data centers in occupied territories

This week the Ukrainian Armed Forces said its military had hit command and control points of Russian forces in the occupied Luhansk region and near Kurakhove in the Donetsk region.

Local press reports drones struck telecommunications facilities in the Russian-occupied cities of Donetsk and Luhansk operated by Russian-controlled telecoms firms, Ugletelecom and Lugacom.

The Luhansk facility was reportedly operated by Ukrtelecom until Russian forces took over and its operation fell to Lugacom.

ATESH (АТЕШ), which describes itself as a military movement of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, this week claimed to have disrupted communications around the IXcellerate data center in Russia, located near Moscow. In a post to Telegram, the group shows a telecommunications box being set on fire. The group said the Russian military uses the facility for communications, including command and control channels and air defense systems.

Data centers become targets in ongoing conflict

The conflict between Ukraine and Russia has been ongoing since 2014, with significant escalation in 2022 after Russian forces conducted a large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Both Russia and Ukraine have stepped up attacks on each other's digital infrastructure in recent weeks.

Russia has launched multiple drone strikes against infrastructure in Ukraine, including an attack on Kyivstar’s headquarters.

Facilities around Kyiv operated by Parkovyi Data Center, UTELS, MiroHost, Datagroup, Vodafone Ukraine, De Novo, Cosmonova, Omega Telecom, Ukrsibbank, and Ukrtelecom have been hit in recent weeks.

Outside Kyiv, facilities operated by Tenet in Odesa and the RX-Name data center in the Nikolaev/Mykolaiv area of southern Ukraine have also been hit.

Ukraine has struck back with multiple attacks on Russian-owned digital infrastructure, including strikes on several data centers owned by Yandex and Sberbank. Earlier this year, Ukrainian forces struck a data center in Russian-occupied Ukraine in Prymorsk.

Russian officials have been discussing mitigating measures for attacks on its data centers, ranging from building “doomsday” data centers to siting facilities in disused coal mines or friendly neighboring territories.

Several Starlink ground station sites in Europe, including in Poland, Bulgaria, and Lithuania, have been targets of arson attacks in recent weeks, with officials linking the incidents to Russia. This comes as Elon Musk has been accused of reducing Starlink's available satellite communications capacity in Ukraine.