Another driver, Valery from Krasnodar, had been on the job for only a few months, having previously worked at a packing center for Wildberries, Russia’s retail giant, whose warehouse was attacked by Ukrainian drones in July.

When the Yandex outages started, he said, the taxi app would show error messages or even send several cars for the same customer.

While that has been largely resolved, said Valery, 24, the biggest issue for him was that he could not withdraw the money that he had already earned with Yandex. “If I can’t access my pay in another week or two, I will start looking for another job,” he said.

In addition to Yandex, the data centers of Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, and the tech giant VK have also been targeted in recent days.

The chaos is no accident, analysts say. “Ukraine’s campaign from the start has had as one of its objectives bringing home to ordinary Russians the fact that they are at war and this involves consequences,” Keir Giles, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a British think tank, told NBC News.

The aim, Giles said, is for everyday Russians to conclude that their lives are being disrupted because of their leaders’ actions in waging war.

Yandex may also be a target because of its role in shaping what Russians see online, said Robert Tollast, a drone expert and researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

Data centers also have growing military value, Tollast said, as both sides use battlefield data to improve operations and commanders’ situational awareness, potentially with AI-assisted planning.

Asked about the outages and whether the government was looking into financially assisting those affected, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was premature to talk about government support, because Yandex is “facing difficulties,” but it is “strong and powerful.” Meanwhile, Russian authorities were looking at protecting data centers after the “unprecedented attack,” Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev said.

On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin held a meeting on enhancing the level of digital security in Russia, but Peskov said it was not linked to the attacks on data centers.

Russia has increasingly ramped up its own attacks on Ukrainian data centers, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accusing Moscow of trying to “leave Ukrainians without the internet.” Ukraine was reciprocating those strikes by hitting Yandex, he said in a speech last week, adding without providing evidence that “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms” because there were fewer Russian bots around. NBC News could not verify whether Yandex services’ going down had that effect.

While both sides have hit data centers, Russia’s were easier targets, said Mykhailo Samus, a Ukrainian military analyst and director of the New Geopolitics Research Network.

While Ukraine’s data centers are widely dispersed, many of Russia’s are concentrated in a handful of large facilities, he said, meaning a strike on a single site can disrupt services spanning transportation, internet access and payments.

“Very easy and very important,” he said.