Russian Strike Destroys GigaCenter Data Center in Kyiv as Ukraine Targets Telecom Sites in Occupied Territories

The destruction of GigaCenter's facility in Kyiv marks the latest escalation in a widening campaign against digital infrastructure on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, underscoring the growing vulnerability of data centers as strategic targets in modern warfare.

GigaCenter's data center in Kyiv was critically damaged and rendered inoperable following a Russian strike on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 20. The company confirmed the attack in a social media statement, saying the facility was "critically damaged and disabled" and that operations had been forced to stop indefinitely. GigaCenter's website was offline at the time of reporting. The company operates a single Tier III-standard data center in Kyiv, a 1,200-square-meter facility with 550 square meters of IT whitespace and capacity for approximately 300 racks. The site opened in 2014 and is listed at Vasylkivska St, 37B, in the southwest of the city. GigaCenter is part of GigaGroup, founded in 2006, which also includes telecom operator GigaTrans, cybersecurity firm GigaSafe, and cloud provider GigaCloud.

The impact rippled across the group's operations. GigaCloud said in a separate statement that the strike damaged one of the data centers hosting its cloud services, though all client services continued to operate normally through backup decentralized sites in Ukraine and the European Union. The cloud provider operates out of five data centers in the EU through colocation partners including Equinix, Atman, and Talex, and maintains additional capacity at BeMobile's Kyiv data center and a facility in Lviv. GigaTrans reported that one of its network root nodes was damaged, but geographic redundancy and duplication of network elements ensured all services continued in full. The company emphasized that no employees were injured.

The strike is part of a broader pattern of attacks on digital infrastructure. This week, the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported hitting command and control points of Russian forces in the occupied Luhansk region and near Kurakhove in the Donetsk region. Local press reported that drones struck telecommunications facilities in the Russian-occupied cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, operated by Russian-controlled firms Ugletelecom and Lugacom. The Luhansk facility was reportedly operated by Ukrtelecom until Russian forces took over. Separately, the ATESH movement claimed to have disrupted communications around the IXcellerate data center near Moscow, posting footage of a telecommunications box being set on fire and alleging the facility supports Russian military command and control channels and air defense systems.

Both Russia and Ukraine have significantly escalated attacks on each other's digital infrastructure in recent weeks. Russian drone strikes have targeted facilities across Kyiv operated by Parkovyi Data Center, UTELS, MiroHost, Datagroup, Vodafone Ukraine, De Novo, Cosmonova, Omega Telecom, Ukrsibbank, and Ukrtelecom, as well as sites operated by Tenet in Odesa and RX-Name in the Mykolaiv area. Ukraine has retaliated with strikes on several data centers owned by Yandex and Sberbank, and earlier this year struck a facility in Russian-occupied Prymorsk. Russian officials have discussed mitigation measures including building "doomsday" data centers, siting facilities in disused coal mines, or relocating to friendly neighboring territories. The conflict has also spilled into Europe, with arson attacks targeting Starlink ground stations in Poland, Bulgaria, and Lithuania in recent weeks, incidents that officials have linked to Russia. The systematic targeting of data centers represents a significant shift in the character of the conflict, elevating commercial digital infrastructure to the status of military objective and raising urgent questions about resilience, redundancy, and the physical security of critical computing assets in active war zones.