Yandex data centre shut by drones, third hit in four days

A Yandex data centre in Vladimir stopped working on Sunday after a Ukrainian drone attack, the third strike on the tech giant’s sites in four days.

Yandex, often called Russia’s Google, said the drones damaged the site’s infrastructure and halted its operations completely. “There were no injuries,” its cloud service said on Telegram.

The attack caused outages across many Yandex services, according to independent Russian outlet Astra. Users in dozens of Russian cities, as well as in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, could not order taxis or use banking services.

Third Yandex data centre hit this week

The strike widens a Ukrainian campaign against infrastructure deep inside Russia. Thursday’s strike took out a Yandex site at Sasovo, in Ryazan region, to the southeast of the capital.

That hub houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to build its artificial intelligence models. A day later, drones hit the firm’s largest data centre, located in Kaluga region to the capital’s southwest.

Yandex said the attack completely disabled several modules at the Kaluga facility, its largest Yandex data centre. Kaluga Governor Vladislav Shapsha said nine people suffered injuries in the attack, although he did not mention the data centre.

According to Firepoint, a Ukrainian weapons producer, its FP-1 drones carried out the Kaluga raid. Meanwhile, Zelenskyy described the attacks as a response to recent Russian missile strikes on server facilities in Kyiv. “We always respond symmetrically,” he told reporters.

Businesses feel the strain

The company operates the top search engine in Russia along with many other online services. Millions of Russians use its apps every day for maps, music, films and food delivery.

In addition, many businesses rely on its cloud platform. Following the first strikes, Yandex admitted that keeping services online was “not an easy” job. It also struck a deal with rival cloud firms so clients could quickly shift their data. Its teams, the company said, were working day and night to bring affected services back.

Alexander Savitsky, who runs a dating app called Pulse, said none of its 8,000 users could reach it after Thursday. “The project represents three years of work,” he said.

Its stock dropped over 4% in Moscow trading following the second attack. If the strikes go on, warned Maryana Lazaricheva of T-Investments, Yandex may no longer be able to move the load to its other centres.

A widening war on infrastructure

The front line has barely shifted, but both armies keep trading long-range strikes. In recent weeks, Russian forces have also hit Ukrainian server hubs and telecoms facilities, some of them in central Kyiv.

Both sides have also widened their drone attacks this year to energy plants, refineries, ports, ships, warehouses and now data hubs. On Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry said it shot down 505 Ukrainian drones in a single night.

Elsewhere on Sunday, officials in Russia’s Bryansk border region said a Ukrainian drone killed a man and wounded two women. The latest Yandex data centre strike, however, signals that Kyiv sees Russia’s digital backbone as a fair target.