Internet Blackout

Russian strikes cut internet access to as many as 100,000 households in Kyiv this week, Ukrainian officials said. Friday, a Russian drone struck a business center in the Ukrainian capital, killing four people and damaging a data center run by the company Datagroup, the BBC reported. Datagroup said service continued from backup sites while engineers checked the damage.

An escalation, and a targeted one. Assaults on Kyiv's data centers Wednesday and Thursday were part of a deliberate campaign, Ukrainian officials told the Financial Times, according to the Independent.

Russia's defense ministry confirmed it struck the Datagroup site, claiming it was used by Ukrainian military intelligence, the BBC reported. Ukrainian officials tell it differently. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Russia is trying to disrupt the flow of life-saving information, not strike a military target. Alerts about missile and drone threats "save lives," he wrote on X, calling the data centers "critical civilian infrastructure" essential to daily life, according to the Independent and the BBC.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had widened its campaign to include internet providers alongside data centers, aiming to disrupt daily life for ordinary Ukrainians. "All this affects people's ability to stay connected, study, work," he said, according to the BBC. In a separate post, Zelensky said Russia was targeting businesses, data centers and internet providers alike, and called for the world to respond.

Over the past several days, Russia's defense ministry said it also hit data processing and telecommunications sites including New-Telco, United DC, Kyivstar and Parkovyi, the BBC reported.

Not just Kyiv. In Lutsk, electronic information boards at bus and tram stops went dark Friday. City officials blamed the outage on the strikes against Kyiv's data centers, the BBC reported.

For weeks, Russia has intensified attacks on Ukraine's energy and rail networks as winter approaches, the BBC reported.

Zelensky's adviser on defense technologies, Serhii Beskrestnov, said Thursday that local disruptions are likely and that internet costs could rise to cover repairs. Ukraine's network is highly decentralized, he said, so the country "will not be left without internet access," according to the BBC.