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A drone attack sparked a fire at a Yandex data center in Sasovo, in Russia’s Ryazan region, and forced the facility to suspend operations on Thursday, October 8. The disruption affected part of the company’s infrastructure, while Yandex said its core consumer services remained available and that it was working to restore affected services.
The strike marks the first confirmed major drone attack on a Russian data center since the start of the war with Ukraine, according to Reuters. The facility is one of Yandex’s five large data centers and hosts tens of thousands of servers, placing the incident among a widening series of attacks on infrastructure supporting digital services.
Cloud customers told to use other data center zones
Yandex’s cloud-service status information reported an electricity supply problem in one data center zone and advised customers to use other zones. The company did not detail the extent of the physical damage or say when the Sasovo site might resume operating.
AFP reported that Yandex said there were no casualties and that emergency services were at the site. Ryazan regional governor Pavel Malkov said two Ukrainian drones were shot down over the region overnight and that a business roof caught fire in the Sasovo area. Yandex did not identify the drone’s origin in its comments to AFP.
Several Russian online services reported technical problems on Thursday, including real-estate aggregator Cian, book portal Litmarket, Russian Railways’ website and the website of football club Spartak Moscow. A Moscow-region bus operator also said online ticket sales were unavailable because of a temporary data-center shutdown. The reports indicate disruptions beyond Yandex, but do not establish which individual outages were caused by the Sasovo incident.
Potential impact on AI infrastructure remains unclear
The Sasovo facility has a role in Yandex’s artificial-intelligence work as well as its cloud business. Yandex said in 2021 that two of its three supercomputers, built using Nvidia A100 chips, were housed there and used to train its YandexGPT model. The company declined to say whether those machines were affected by Thursday’s attack.
Yandex operates YandexGPT and a range of consumer services, including search, taxi and music products, alongside its cloud platform. While the company said its core consumer services were not affected, the status of particular systems and customers dependent on the disrupted data-center zone remained uncertain in the initial reporting.
Reuters reported that online monitoring service Detector404 had received 58,268 user complaints over the preceding day. Yandex shares on the Moscow Exchange, which Reuters described as a proxy for the Russian technology sector, were down about 3% in Thursday trading. The report did not establish that the share-price move was solely attributable to the data-center attack.
Data centers enter a wider pattern of infrastructure strikes
The attack comes as drone strikes between Russia and Ukraine have extended across economic infrastructure, including energy facilities, refineries, ports, vessels and e-commerce warehouses. Russia has also carried out attacks on Ukrainian data centers and telecommunications infrastructure over the preceding month, including targets in central Kyiv, Reuters reported.
Damage to data centers can affect multiple online services at once because the facilities house servers and other equipment that support computing, storage and network operations. The extent of any broader impact depends on what services are hosted at the affected site and whether operators can shift activity to other locations. Yandex’s advice to use other cloud zones suggests it had alternatives for some customers, but the company had not published a full account of service effects or recovery timing.
Data Center Dynamics reported that the Sasovo facility was identified as Yandex DC Sasovo and described as the company’s largest data-center site. It also reported that Yandex Cloud’s status dashboard showed a power outage in the ru-central-b availability zone. The company’s own public description, as relayed in Reuters coverage, identified the outage as affecting one zone and did not provide a detailed damage assessment.
Recovery timeline and further details not announced
Yandex said it was addressing the consequences and restoring affected services, but had not announced a timetable for reopening the facility. It also had not disclosed repair costs, the number of customers affected, or whether the Sasovo supercomputers sustained damage. Those details will determine how long the incident affects cloud customers and whether it has longer-lasting implications for the company’s AI computing capacity.
The strike is also unfolding against a backdrop of increased attention to the protection of critical infrastructure in Russia. Reuters reported that President Vladimir Putin signed an August measure allowing the state to take control of critically important infrastructure if it is considered inadequately protected from drone attacks. No official action related specifically to Yandex’s Sasovo site had been reported by Thursday.
