On February 24, Russia launched an invasion of neighboring Ukraine after months of a military build-up on its borders.
The attack began with cyberattacks that targeted Ukrainian government departments with floods of internet traffic and data-wiping malware, followed by a ground, sea and air incursion. News outlets in Ukraine are also reporting outages caused by cyberattacks, which the Ukrainian government says it has “unambiguously linked” to Moscow.
The invasion was met with sharp rebuke from the United States, the European Union, and NATO allies with broad, unprecedented financial and diplomatic sanctions promised against Russia, sanctions that are likely to affect business, trade and finance across the region.
The impacts of the invasion are also, undoubtedly, being felt across Ukraine’s wider tech ecosystem, which includes not only hundreds of startups and larger tech firms, but also research and development offices for some of the world’s biggest technology brands.
As the situation on the ground changes rapidly over the next few hours and days, TechCrunch will continue to bring news and analysis on how the conflict unfolds across the tech and startup community.
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A director at one major tech company, who asked us to not name the company for the safety of its employees, confirmed to us that it is in the process of working out how to evacuate all of its staff in Ukraine. The situation is being hampered by the fact that all airspace is now out of bounds, and public transportation is largely out of action. The current plan is to figure out how to get staff across the border either to Hungary or Poland.
The situation is also going to spell major economic fallout for startups in Ukraine.
Readdle, the company that makes PDF, email and other productivity tools, is one of the better known bootstrapped startups out of Ukraine. Based out of the southern city of Odessa, the company’s main spokesperson and managing director Denys Zhadanov canceled a phone interview for this story, saying that there were too many emergencies that needed to be handled at the moment. He did, however, speak with TechCrunch by text message.
“We’ve made business continuity plans a while ago and [are] executing them now,” he said. “All Readdle products and services at Readdle are up and running, and there’s no evacuation for the team [being undertaken] at this point.”
Zhadanov noted that Readdle has grown into an international company a while ago, with people employed in 11 countries. A “big chunk” of the team, he said, is still based in Ukraine.
“Ukraine is home to the finest engineers, designers, and other tech professionals,” he added. “I know that many tech CEOs have made a conscious decision to stay in Ukraine. Many of them are helping and donating to help the county and its people.”
In Ukraine, there are many more home-grown startups that are also feeling the fall out (and bear supporting if you’re so inclined). They include Ajax, a home wireless security company; the AI-based grammar and writing engine Grammarly; the face-swapping app Reface; pet camera system Petcube; People AI, the sales and marketing intelligence startup; and language tutor marketplace Preply. These companies have raised funding from some of the world’s biggest VCs and one question will be how and if those relationships will be impacted with the latest developments.
Software house MacPaw, which develops Mac software and utilities, said in a blog post that while its headquarters is in Kyiv, its infrastructure is hosted on Amazon Web Services and physically located outside of Ukraine. Its payments processor, Paddle, is based in the U.K., and anticipates that “nothing is going to change” for its users. “At this moment, we’re staying strong, united, and ready to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” said MacPaw in an email to TechCrunch.
In addition to startups, you have larger tech companies that have both R&D operations out of the country as well as teams providing more localized services, ranging from content to ad sales.
For those with consumer-facing platforms like Google’s YouTube or ByteDance’s TikTok, the question will be how they are being used — or misused — with disinformation, or conversely censorship, and how the companies are handling that kind of traffic. On top of that is the question of services overall, how they are staying up, and whether they are running the risk of getting shut down due to sanctions or interruptions of internet service. We’ve reached out to Meta, Apple, Facebook, Google, ByteDance, and Snap for comment and will update this as and when we learn more.
A few points to note for now:
Google, by the looks of it, has around 200 people working in the country, covering both R&D for global services and localized operations. It has faced a number of issues over the years with censorship around YouTube in Russia although that, so far, has not had an analogue in Ukraine.
TikTok and its parent ByteDance do not have staff in Ukraine, but they do have a very popular app — which last year was estimated to have a reach of 30% in the country, doubling over the previous year. We chronicled last year how it emerged as a key battleground around Navalny-fuelled, anti-Putin activism.
Twitter is warning users in Ukraine to protect their online accounts, such as using multi-factor authentication and disabling location in tweets. It’s a sharp turnaround from 24 hours earlier, when Twitter confirmed it mistakenly suspended accounts that are sharing details about Russia’s military activities prior to the invasion.
And, internet giant Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince said the company had “removed all Cloudflare customer cryptographic material from servers in Ukraine,” hours after the invasion began, as part of an effort to protect customer data and communications in the event that the datacenter is compromised. Cloudflare opened its Kyiv datacenter in 2016, which remains operational according to the company’s status pages. Cloudflare provides content delivery and network security to organizations and governments.
TechCrunch will bring you updates as we learn more.
