Technology & Science
Drone attacks shut down one Yandex data center and damage another
Two of Yandex's data centers were affected on consecutive days, the company said. Sasovo was shut down, while only part of Kaluga was reported out of service; repair timing and the wider impact remain uncertain.
Executive summary
- Two sites affected: Yandex said a drone attack seriously damaged its Sasovo data center overnight Oct. 7–8, forcing a full shutdown. A second attack the next morning damaged infrastructure at its Kaluga center; the company said some modules were out of service. It reported no employee injuries at either site.[1][2]
- Cloud services: A Yandex Cloud advisory tied an outage in availability zone ru-central1-b to a fire after the Sasovo attack. The status notice described that zone as unavailable and warned that creating some cloud resources could be limited; it was a dated service update, not a full inventory of current outages.[3]
- Unresolved impact: Yandex said it was still assessing damage and could not give a restoration timeline. Reuters reported that two of the company's three supercomputers used for its AI model were housed at Sasovo, but Yandex did not say whether either machine was damaged.[1][2]
Yandex said its data center in Sasovo, in Russia's Ryazan region, was seriously damaged by a drone attack on the night of Oct. 7–8 and had been completely shut down. On the morning of Oct. 9, another of the company's data centers in Kaluga was attacked, leaving part of its infrastructure out of service. Yandex said no employees were hurt at either location and emergency responders and company staff were working at the sites.[1]
The company did not publish a repair schedule or a full assessment of the equipment damage. It said the condition of the infrastructure was still being assessed and that it was difficult to estimate when equipment at the centers could return to operation. Reuters reported Yandex operates five large data centers and said the scale of customer disruption was not yet clear.[1][2]
In an Oct. 8 status update, Yandex Cloud said a fire following a drone attack on its Sasovo data center had affected part of its infrastructure and left availability zone ru-central1-b unavailable. The notice said some creation of new cloud resources could be limited and advised customers to use other availability zones where possible. That notice documents the incident at the time of the update; it does not establish the status of every Yandex service now.[3]
Reuters described one customer impact: the operator of the Pulse dating app said its 8,000 users could not access the app and its team could not reach a backup database in Yandex Cloud. He said there was no confirmation of data loss. Reuters also reported Yandex had arranged with other cloud providers to help customers move data and services, while the full disruption remained unclear.[2]
Reuters reported that the Sasovo site housed two of Yandex's three supercomputers used to develop its YandexGPT model, citing information the company gave in 2021. Yandex has not said whether those systems were damaged. The site shutdown therefore does not establish that the supercomputers or the company's AI training work were lost.[2]
Yandex described drone attacks but did not name the force behind them in its statement. Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point said its FP-1 drones were used in the Kaluga strike, according to Interfax Ukraine and Reuters. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters Ukraine had responded to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers when asked about the earlier Yandex strike, the Kyiv Independent reported. Those public claims establish attribution statements, not an independent assessment of each facility's damage.[4][2][5]
The company's available figures distinguish a complete shutdown at Sasovo from partial damage at Kaluga. Neither Yandex nor the cited reporting had established the total amount of lost capacity, the time needed for repairs, or a complete list of affected customer services by Oct. 10.[1][2][6]