Russia began a military invasion of the country of Ukraine on February 24, which is still ongoing and prompted started a chain of sanctions against Russia. Google, Meta (Facebook's parent company), Apple, and many other tech companies are in the process of winding down operations in Russia, mostly due to sanctions enforced by Europe and the United States. Russia now has another problem on its hands: the country is running out of storage for cloud services.

The Russian news outlet Kommersant, citing government sources, is reporting that Russia is rapidly running out of domestic data storage for servers and other critical IT equipment. Russia's Ministry of Digital Transformation reportedly held a meeting on March 9 with representatives Sberbank, MTS, Oxygen, Rostelecom, Atom-Data, Croc, and Yandex. One source told Kommersant that the departure of foreign cloud services like Google and Amazon increased demand on local storage, and the country expects that capacity to run out within the next two months. The shortage could lead to non-essential services shutting down, such as cloud gaming, music streaming, and video sharing platforms.

Russia is also reportedly having difficulty importing equipment from China, due to increased prices (the value of Russia's currency is tanking) and disputed logistics. One source reportedly told Kommersant (translated), "Two truckloads of servers from a foreign vendor entered the country, but they refuse to give them to us, citing sanctions." Ironically, Huawei has supposedly stopped shipments to Russia until March 26, which itself has been negatively affected by US sanctions over the past few years.

Russia is exploring a few options for the data storage, including seizing computers from companies leaving the country. The simplest solution would likely be for Russia to stop its invasion of Ukraine, which the United Nations reports has killed around 700 civilians so far, including 48 children.

Source: Kommersant

Via: Bleeping Computer

Featured image: Flag of Ukraine by Wikimedia user UP9, use allowed by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license