Drone strikes on three Yandex data centers disrupt cloud and online services across Russia
Two facilities have shut down completely after the attacks, which are believed to have been carried out by Ukrainian forces. One of them reportedly housed two of Yandex's three AI training supercomputers.
Evidence: Independent reports. Security stories run only with a named disclosure or independent reporting behind them.
Drones have hit three of Yandex's six data centers in Russia in less than a week. The attacks are believed to have been carried out by Ukrainian forces. A facility in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, was struck overnight on October 7-8 and shut down after a fire. A site in Kaluga was damaged on October 9. The Record reports that a facility in Vladimir was hit overnight on Sunday, and BleepingComputer dates that attack to October 11. Yandex said the Vladimir data center "has shut down completely, and the remaining infrastructure is unstable," with the platform "operating in emergency mode." The Sasovo and Vladimir sites have stopped working, while Kaluga is running at reduced capacity. The Record reports that the Sasovo site houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers used to train AI models. Users have reported outages across cloud services, payments and deliveries, and some cannot reach files stored in Yandex's cloud. Yandex, often called Russia's Google, provides search, maps, ride-hailing, email and business cloud infrastructure that many government and private organizations depend on. Yandex said no employees were injured. The strikes show how physical attacks on computing facilities can disrupt digital services across an entire country.