Drone strikes disrupt two Yandex data centres in Russia

Yandex said its Kaluga facility was hit on October 9, a day after a separate strike halted operations at its Sasovo data centre and disrupted some services.

Yandex said several modules at its data centre in Russia’s Kaluga region were completely knocked out. Ukrainian arms maker Firepoint said Kyiv used FP-1 one-way attack drones in the strike. The scale of the damage and the time needed to restore the infrastructure were not yet clear.

The previous day, an attack halted operations at Yandex’s data centre in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region. The company had said the site housed two of its three supercomputers used to develop YandexGPT. Yandex has not said whether those systems were damaged.

The outages affected users of Yandex Cloud. Alexander Savitsky, founder of the Pulse dating app, which has about 8,000 users, told Reuters that customers had been unable to access the service since Thursday. His company could not reach its backup database in Yandex Cloud and received an error when trying to restore it elsewhere. Savitsky said there was no confirmation of data loss.

Yandex said it had agreed with other cloud providers to help clients move data and services. It was working around the clock to restore operations but gave no timeline. Yandex shares fell more than 4% on the Moscow Exchange.

Reuters also reported technical problems at several Russian online services and websites that use Yandex infrastructure. The Kaluga regional governor said nine people had been injured in attacks in the region but did not say whether the data centre was involved.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy confirmed the strike on the Kaluga facility and called it a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian digital infrastructure. Recent attacks have hit data centres in both countries. Analysts cited by Reuters warned of risks to corporate clients if the strikes continue.