Summary
- The operator says a renewed ballistic strike on 19 October destroyed a Kyiv data centre previously damaged on 25 September.
- Datagroup reports no employee injuries and says services continue from backup locations.
- The facility's MW capacity, equipment losses, financial cost and replacement strategy have not been disclosed.
Datagroup says a further Russian ballistic strike has destroyed the infrastructure of its Kyiv data centre beyond repair, while customer services continue operating from reserve sites.
The Ukrainian telecommunications operator’s chief executive, Mykhailo Shelemba, reported the latest attack on 19 October 2026. He said the equipment and supporting infrastructure could not be restored and that no employees had been injured in the incident.
The site had already sustained damage during an attack on 25 September. At that point, the operator said engineers were assessing the damage and working on recovery while customer data remained protected and services continued from backup locations.
The October development changes that assessment from repair work to the permanent loss of the affected facility. The company has not published the installation’s electrical capacity, area, hardware inventory, insured value or a replacement plan.
Permanent site loss differs from a recoverable fault
A data centre depends on the integrity of several connected systems. Electrical supply and distribution, cooling, communications links and computing equipment all contribute to continued operation, while access and safety conditions determine whether engineers can inspect and repair damaged plant.
Severe physical damage can make a facility unusable even if some individual components survive. The feasibility of restarting equipment depends on the building, supporting infrastructure, environmental conditions and the ability to restore the necessary electrical and network services safely.
Datagroup’s statement establishes that it considers recovery impossible. It does not identify which equipment was struck, the structural condition of each part of the building or whether the decisive damage occurred in its electrical, mechanical or communications systems.
Any account naming a failed transformer, generator, cooling plant or server hall as the determining cause would therefore go beyond the evidence currently available. Likewise, the extent of the destruction cannot be translated into lost IT load without a verified capacity figure.
The earlier September strike is relevant because it shows that the operator was already using reserve infrastructure while the damaged facility was assessed. The renewed attack removed the prospect of restoring operations at the original location, according to the company’s latest account.
The incident occurred amid wider missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s energy and civilian infrastructure. The consequences for other facilities should not be attributed to Datagroup without separate evidence, and injuries reported elsewhere in Kyiv must not be confused with the company’s confirmation that its employees were unharmed.
Backup infrastructure sustains services
Shelemba said Datagroup’s services continued from reserve sites despite the loss of the data centre. This establishes a distinction between destruction of physical infrastructure and the continuity of the services that previously depended on it.
Operating from alternate sites can require customer applications and data to be replicated, sufficient computing and network capacity to be available elsewhere, and traffic to be directed to functioning infrastructure. The practical recovery process varies with the services involved and the original architecture.
The operator has not disclosed its recovery point or recovery time objectives, the sites used as backups or the proportion of the previous workload placed at each location. Its statement therefore supports continued service delivery without establishing that every customer experienced uninterrupted access.
Datagroup is part of the DVL group, which also includes Volia and lifecell. The company’s network and data centre operations have become exposed to physical threats affecting both premises and the wider infrastructure on which telecommunications services depend.
For services tied to a particular geographic location, backup arrangements may need alternative fibre paths as well as working servers. Geographically separate facilities can avoid some common physical threats, but they may still share dependencies on power, networks or specialised systems.
Capacity at reserve locations also matters after an emergency has been stabilised. Infrastructure intended for temporary recovery may have to support production services for an extended period, increasing the importance of sufficient cooling, power, monitoring and maintenance resources.
Datagroup has not identified the spare capacity remaining at its reserve sites after the latest attack. Continued delivery of existing services does not demonstrate that the previous level of redundancy remains available for another major incident.
Replacement and resilience decisions remain open
Longer-term recovery after the loss of a physical facility can involve rebuilding at a different location, acquiring third-party capacity or reorganising workloads across existing sites. Each route presents different requirements for electricity access, network connections, equipment procurement and customer migration.
There is no confirmed Datagroup decision on which approach it will take. No replacement site, construction timetable or capital budget has been announced, and the financial consequences of the destruction have not been quantified publicly.
The incident also differs from a conventional software or cybersecurity failure. An attack on a building or its supporting systems may prevent access to computing infrastructure regardless of whether the underlying applications and data remain intact.
Maintaining operations under those conditions requires resilience to be designed around whole service dependencies, rather than only the survival of individual servers. Datagroup’s account confirms that reserve sites are supporting service delivery, although their detailed architecture and the limits of that protection remain undisclosed.
The latest verified position is consequently precise: a data centre damaged in September was struck again on 19 October, Datagroup considers it beyond repair, its employees were unharmed, and services continue from backup infrastructure. The scale and cost of replacing the site remain unknown.
