Drones struck a Yandex data centre in Russia's Vladimir region, halting its operations and disrupting more than 80 services. It is the third attack on the company's server infrastructure since last week.
What was hit?
Kyiv Post, citing the Telegram channels ASTRA and Crimean Wind, said the target was a facility of roughly 40 to 50 megawatts in Vladimir's Energetik district. It is built to hold up to 2,880 server racks and is one of Yandex's core processing hubs. Yandex confirmed that the site had stopped working.
Consumer and enterprise services disrupted
According to Kyiv Post, the outage hit everyday Yandex products, including the Alice voice assistant, Yandex Music, the Telemost video-calling tool and the Smart Home platform.
Yandex Cloud customers were affected more heavily. The report lists outages in Compute Cloud, Object Storage, Managed Kubernetes and the PostgreSQL and ClickHouse database services, along with developer tools. Yandex's AI interfaces, including the YandexGPT API, SpeechKit and Vision OCR, were also disrupted.
Fallout beyond Yandex
Kyiv Post said the effects spread to outside businesses in Russia and neighbouring countries. Users reported failures in banking apps and ride-hailing services, and at retail chains such as Magnit and Fix Price.
Power grid damaged
Vladimir Governor Aleksandr Avdeev said the strikes damaged local electrical substations and cut power in parts of the city. By Sunday morning, he said, utility crews had restored heating and water supplies and about 80 percent of electricity in the affected areas.
Russia's Defence Ministry said its air defences shot down 479 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones overnight over 16 regions, including Vladimir, Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk and Rostov, as well as Crimea and the Black Sea.
A string of attacks in four days
The Vladimir strike follows two earlier hits on Yandex sites.
- On October 8, drones struck a data centre in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, and operations there were completely halted. The outage disrupted services used by Russian Railways, the mobile operator MegaFon and several Russian media outlets. Reuters reported that two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI models are housed at Sasovo.
- On October 9, Yandex said several modules at its Kaluga data centre were completely disabled. It told the independent outlet Meduza it was still assessing the damage and could not say when the equipment would be back online.
Yandex has since removed the locations of its data centres in four Russian regions from its mapping platform. Yandex shares fell about 4 percent on the Moscow Exchange earlier in the week.
Strategic angle
Ukrainian military analysts argue that systematic strikes on data centres and communications networks complicate Russian state logistics and corporate administration. They also say the strikes weaken the digital command-and-control systems that support Russia's war effort.
Both sides have widened their drone campaigns this year. Reuters reports that Russia has spent the past month striking Ukrainian data centres and telecom infrastructure, including targets in central Kyiv, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said Ukraine "responds in mirror-like fashion."
