Russia’s Aeroflot Forced To Cancel Over 50 Flights After Major Pro-Ukraine Cyberattack

Russia’s biggest and most well-known airline, Aeroflot, was forced to cancel and delay many dozens of flights on Monday after a major system failure that was later claimed to be the result of a coordinated cyberattack by Ukrainian and Belarusian hacker groups.

If the cyberattack allegations are accurate, this would mark a serious escalation in the spate of sabotage attacks carried out against Russia over the past couple years in the context of the Ukraine war – as such espionage directly targeting a civilian airline company is unprecedented.

The airline reported disruptions to its electronic systems, causing immediate adjustments to flight schedules and causing delays and cancellations. Already the Russian population is deeply frustrated at what have become almost routine delays due to inbound drone attacks on major cities like Moscow.

“Passengers may experience difficulties accessing our services,” Aeroflot said in a statement, also seeking to assure that technical teams are working diligently to resolve the issues.

Regional media indicated that over 40 flights had been canceled by late Monday morning Moscow time. And later, the airline confirmed it canceled more than 50 flights, mostly within Russia. But some regional and international routes were also impacted, with flights canceled to the Belarusian capital of Minsk and the Armenian capital, Yerevan. Many other flights were also delayed.

A group going by the name Silent Crow is taking responsibility:

A statement purporting to be from a hacking group called Silent Crow said it had carried out the operation with a Belarusian group called Cyber Partisans, and linked it to the war in Ukraine.

“Glory to Ukraine! Long live Belarus!” said the statement, whose authenticity Reuters could not immediately verify.

Silent Crow has previously claimed responsibility for attacks this year on a Russian real estate database, a state telecoms company, a large insurer, the Moscow government’s IT department and the Russian office of the South Korean carmaker Kia. Some of these resulted in big data leaks.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded by saying, “The information that we are reading in the public domain is quite alarming. The hacker threat is a threat that remains for all large companies providing services to the population.”

“We will, of course, clarify the information and wait for appropriate clarifications,” he continued.

These have become familiar scenes as Ukrainian intelligence seeks to disrupt daily life in Russia, hoping that this will put pressure on the Kremlin and destabilize the Putin government…

BIG: A massive cyberattack has paralyzed Russia’s biggest airline Aeroflot.

All systems are down, airports are in chaos, and staff can’t even refuel planes.

Roughly 7,000 servers destroyed and 20 TB of data stolen. Hackers say they’ll start leaking data soon.

No group has… pic.twitter.com/UgaKJRb7hJ

— Clash Report (@clashreport) July 28, 2025

In all, the hacker groups claimed to have destroyed some 7,000 servers, accessed flight history records, infiltrated key corporate systems, and extracted sensitive company data after taking control of employees’ computers, according to several international reports. They say they’ll start leaking this sensitive information soon.