cloud infrastructure6 articles
Ukraine Drones Take Out Three Yandex Datacentres, Payments and Cloud Still Limping
Ukrainian drone strikes hit three of Yandex's five Russian datacenters between October 7–9, causing serious damage and taking services including Yandex Cloud and Yandex Pay offline. Engineers are working to restore services, with connectivity reportedly at just 30% of normal levels, though the company assures users their money is safe. The attacks were described by Ukrainian President Zelensky as retaliation for Russian drone strikes on Kyiv datacenters, amid broader ongoing exchanges targeting each other's infrastructure.
Drone Strike Knocks Out Yandex Datacenter. Industry Told You So.
A Ukrainian drone attack caused a fire at Yandex's datacenter in Sasovo, Russia, taking down one of its cloud availability zones with little prospect of near-term restoration. Yandex, Russia's dominant internet company, has not officially attributed the attack, though Ukrainian President Zelensky suggested it was a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian datacenters. The incident highlights a growing trend of datacenters becoming targets in armed conflict, following a similar attack on an AWS facility in Bahrain earlier in the year.
AWS Confirms Permanent Data Loss After Iranian Strikes Destroyed Middle East Data Centres
Six months after Iranian drone and missile strikes targeted Amazon Web Services data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, AWS has confirmed the permanent, irrecoverable loss of some customer data. The damage was severe enough to overwhelm AWS's multi-availability-zone redundancy design, with all three availability zones in Bahrain and one in the UAE rendered unrestorable. Amazon has suspended billing in the affected regions, issued $150 million in customer credits, and says it will provide further updates on long-term recovery efforts in early 2027.
Humans Will Be a 'Rounding Error' on the Internet Within Five Years, Says Cloudflare CFO
Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert has predicted that non-human internet traffic will be 1,000 times greater than human traffic within five years, driven by AI, making humans "a rounding error on the internet." The company reported strong Q2 results with $696 million in revenue — a 36% year-over-year increase — beating expectations and signing a record number of large clients, though losses more than tripled to $205.7 million. CEO Matthew Prince used the earnings call to differentiate Cloudflare from hyperscalers, arguing the company focuses on delivering actual computational work efficiently rather than simply leasing commodity server capacity, a strategy that helped drive shares up 16% in after-hours trading.
AWS Billing Console Loses the Plot, Tells Users They Owe Trillions
A software bug in AWS's billing system caused wildly inflated cost estimates to be displayed in the Cost Explorer console, with some users receiving estimates in the billions or even trillions of dollars despite negligible actual usage. AWS confirmed the figures were inaccurate and did not reflect real charges, pausing further estimate updates while investigating the issue. The company identified and mitigated the root cause and expected corrected billing figures to be restored for all customers by noon Pacific time on Saturday, July 18.
Cloud Bare Metal Is Now Undercutting On-Prem on Price and Availability, Says Nutanix CEO
Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami says hyperscalers' bulk purchasing power means bare metal cloud servers are now often cheaper and more readily available than on-premises hardware, pushing some traditionally on-prem customers toward the cloud. However, he noted a countertrend of customers favouring on-prem infrastructure for AI workloads to keep costs predictable, as ROI on AI remains uncertain. Nutanix reported Q3 2026 revenue of $703 million, a 10% year-on-year increase, and added 730 new customers, many migrating from VMware.