Yandex Loses a Third Data Centre in Four Days as Drone Strikes Hit Russia's Biggest AI Developer

Yandex said on Sunday, October 11, that a drone attack had fully shut down its data centre in Russia's Vladimir region, the third of its five large facilities knocked out or disabled in four days. No one was hurt, but some Yandex services became unavailable (Al Jazeera, The Moscow Times).

Three sites in four days

Date	Site	Impact
Thursday, October 8	Sasovo, Ryazan region	Fire; site fully suspended. Houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to build YandexGPT
Friday, October 9	Kaluga, southwest of Moscow	Several modules out of service; newest site, planned at 63 MW and 3,800+ racks
Sunday, October 11	Vladimir, east of Moscow	Fully shut down; Yandex Cloud zone ru-central1-a hit by power interruptions
Not reported hit	Ivanteevka, Mytishchi	-

The first Sasovo strike was the first major attack on a Russian data hub. Vladimir region governor Alexander Avdeyev said drones also knocked out two substations supplying 5,000 residents. Yandex has not said whether the Sasovo supercomputers can be restored or whether any customer data was lost.

What stopped working

Yandex Cloud told customers on October 11 that the platform was running in emergency mode and advised them to switch to their own disaster recovery plans. The Yandex Go taxi app was reported down across Russia on Sunday, with problems in Serbia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia; Yandex Pro, support systems and smart home services were also reportedly affected. After the Sasovo strike, the websites of Russian Railways and MegaFon went offline, NetBlocks recorded Russian connectivity falling to about 70 percent of normal, and Yandex's Disk and Documents services had outages. Yandex shares fell more than 3 percent after the first attack and about 4 percent after the second.

Yandex has since restored most key cloud services by shifting workloads to its other facilities, according to the Associated Press. Rival cloud providers also agreed to let Yandex clients move data quickly, and on October 10 Yandex changed its user agreement to list drone and missile attacks as force majeure.

Who is behind it

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the Kaluga attack and framed it as a response to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres, saying: "We always respond in mirror-like fashion" (The Moscow Times). Over the past month Russia has hit Ukrainian data centres and telecom sites, including in central Kyiv, with one strike cutting internet access for about 100,000 homes. Russia's Defence Ministry says the Yandex facilities processed intelligence data for Ukraine's armed forces; that claim has not been verified. Moscow is weighing drone defences for data centres.

Why the AI angle matters

Yandex is often called Russia's Google, and its YandexGPT models depend on the compute now in question. Its most powerful supercomputer, Chervonenkis, at Sasovo, once ranked 19th in the world but has fallen out of the top 100 as sanctions limit upgrades, so replacing lost hardware will not be simple; experts say restoring the infrastructure could take months or years (Euronews). Maryana Lazaricheva of T-Investments told Reuters Yandex could shift workloads to its remaining sites, but that option disappears if the attacks continue.

The episode marks a shift in how infrastructure is treated in war. No major Russian data centre had been knocked offline before October 8. Data centres hosting cloud services, payments and transport apps are now being treated as strategic targets, and the same logic has surfaced elsewhere: Iran's Revolutionary Guards named 18 US tech firms as military targets in March, and the UAE is splitting up its Stargate campus after Iran listed it as a target.

What to watch next

Whether the Sasovo supercomputers can be recovered, any strike on Ivanteevka or Mytishchi, and whether Moscow deploys air defences around data centres.

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