Russian Strike Disables Kyiv's GigaCenter

For GigaCenter, a Russian strike on Tuesday afternoon was the end of the business, at least for now. For the cloud and network companies in the same group, it was a day of failing over to backups.

GigaCenter, which runs a single data centre in Kyiv, said the facility was “critically damaged and disabled” in a Russian strike on 20 October, DCD reported, quoting the company’s social-media posts. “Unfortunately, we are forced to stop our work indefinitely,” GigaCenter said. Its website was offline when DCD published. It is the second Kyiv data centre in a week to be put out of action, after Datagroup said its own site could not be restored.

One site, built to Tier III, opened in 2014

By DCD’s account, the facility was a Tier III building of 1,200 square metres, with 550 square metres (5,920 sq ft) of space for IT equipment and room for around 300 racks. It opened in 2014, and DCD describes it as appearing to be permanently disabled.

GigaCenter belongs to GigaGroup, founded in 2006, which also includes telecoms operator GigaTrans, cybersecurity firm GigaSafe and cloud provider GigaCloud. Those sister companies are where the story of resilience lies.

The cloud and the network kept running

GigaCloud said a Russian strike had damaged “one of the data centers hosting GigaCloud’s cloud services”, but that “all our clients’ services continue to operate normally on backup decentralized sites in Ukraine and the EU”. According to DCD, GigaCloud’s website lists five data centres in the European Union, using colocation providers including Equinix’s WA3 site in Warsaw, Atman and Talex, and the company is also an OVH partner. It also lists capacity at BeMobile’s data centre in Kyiv and at a facility in Lviv.

GigaTrans said one of the root nodes of its network had been damaged. “Thanks to geographical redundancy and reliable duplication of network elements, all GigaTrans services continue to work and are provided in full,” it said, adding that its employees “were not injured and are safe”.

The contrast is the point. The single-site business lost its building and stopped trading. The businesses that had spread their workloads across several sites, including outside Ukraine, kept customers online. Datagroup made a similar case this week, saying it was serving customers from backup sites after its Kyiv data centre was destroyed.

Kyiv’s data centres have been hit repeatedly

GigaCenter is the latest in a long list. DCD says facilities around Kyiv run by Parkovyi Data Center, UTELS, MiroHost, Datagroup, Vodafone Ukraine, De Novo, Cosmonova, Omega Telecom, Ukrsibbank and Ukrtelecom have been hit in recent weeks, along with Kyivstar’s headquarters. Sites in Odesa and the Mykolaiv area have also been struck.

The attacks run in both directions. Ukrainian strikes have hit several Russian data centres, including three run by Yandex, and DCD reports that Russian officials have floated responses ranging from “doomsday” data centres to facilities in disused coal mines.

For operators and customers elsewhere, the GigaGroup companies offer a plain comparison: a design standard for one building did not keep a single-site business running, while spreading services across sites in Ukraine and the EU did, by the sister firms’ own account. GigaCenter has not said whether it plans to rebuild, and that is the question its remaining customers will be waiting on.