Turn Off That Server: Russia Orders Data Centers to Evict Clients in 24 Hours

During a closed-door meeting led by Maksut Shadaev, commercial data center operators were instructed to carve out a 10% reserve of their total computing power and physical space dedicated strictly to priority state systems on official white lists. If facilities lack this vacant capacity naturally, operators are expected to hastily boot out existing paying customers by forcing companies to terminate active contracts or warn current tenants that their equipment can be forcibly unplugged within a strict 24-hour notice window.

To ease the bureaucratic pain of breaking business agreements, the government is reportedly preparing official definitions classifying these forced evictions as an official act of force majeure, shielding providers from standard contractual lawsuits. Corporate-owned data centers built exclusively for proprietary needs—such as banking infrastructures—are entirely exempt from the mandate, narrowing the disruption laser-beam strictly toward commercial cloud vendors who rent out infrastructure to the open market.

Operators failing to comply before November 12 face severe punitive actions under Presidential Decree No. 604, which grants authorities the power to implement temporary state management over critical infrastructure assets via Rosimushchestvo, potentially seizing company shares, securities, and physical hardware. Industry analysts note that replacing these blocked-off commercial resources will require building entirely new data centers, a costly endeavor with payback periods stretching up to eight years that might stall future technological expansions just to keep select government portals running.

When state bureaucracy decides that someone else's cloud computing bill is secondary to administrative convenience, market economics quietly pack their bags and leave the building.