When servers become targets
Data centers have entered the crosshairs of other recent armed conflicts. During the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran earlier this year, drone strikes hit three Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Since data centers can serve civilian and military purposes simultaneously, the legal status of targeting them is far from straightforward.
Kubo Mačák, an expert on international humanitarian law, said a data center must meet two conditions to qualify as a military objective under the Geneva Conventions: it must make an effective contribution to military operations and destroying it must offer a “definite military advantage.”
“If you know that they are storing military intelligence or that they’re using the data center to power military artificial intelligence tools,” Mačák said, there could be grounds to consider it a military objective.
Following the most recent strikes of the Yandex data centers, users on social media platform X reported a sudden drop in automated bot activity, including from accounts associated with pro-Russian, pro-Trump and Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) narratives.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seized on the reports to boast that the strikes had made social media less toxic, even as independent researchers and national research institutes found no evidence they specifically disrupted any Russian disinformation campaigns.