Drones have damaged a Russian Finance Ministry data center in the suburbs of Gorodets, a facility reportedly holding the Federal Taxation Service's tax database.
Gorodets sits about 230 miles east of the Kremlin and more than 600 miles from the front lines. A trade publication that covers data centers, citing a Russian media outlet, said the site holds several state registries in addition to the tax database. It described the facility as "one of two key data processing centers of the Federal Tax Service of Russia operating in a geo-distributed mode."
How much the strike actually broke is not established in those accounts. They say only that the damage "could potentially affect the operation of state information systems of the Russian Federation." No outage is described.
The strike fits a pattern. Ukraine has hit Russian data centers multiple times since the start of October, a campaign it began after Moscow struck Ukrainian data centers. The finance ministry reportedly runs two other facilities, one at the Federal Data Processing Center in Dubna, Moscow Region, and one in Yerzovka, Volgograd Region. Gorodets would make three sites in total, so this is one of three, not a lone point of failure.
Earlier episodes show how differently these hits can play out. After Ukrainian strikes, traffic from Yandex's bots collapsed, yet Russia's disinformation bot network moved to unaffected data centers and kept running as normal. In the Middle East, Iranian forces hit AWS sites in the UAE and Bahrain in response to the US bombing campaign that began in February. Many digital services in the area were disrupted, and Amazon advised many clients to move to other regions.
The tax service's own description is the useful detail here. A geo-distributed pair of centers is built so that one can fail while the other carries on, and Gorodets is half of that pair. Whether the surviving half did that job is the question the Russian accounts leave open.