Drone Attack Knocks Out Yandex Data Centre in Russia's Vladimir Region

MOSCOW — Russian tech giant Yandex has shut down its data centre in the Vladimir region after a drone attack, the third strike on the company's server infrastructure in just four days.

“Operations at the data centre have been completely suspended,” Yandex said in a service alert on Telegram on Sunday, October 11. The company advised customers to switch on their disaster-recovery plans as its cloud platform ran in emergency mode. No injuries were reported.

Vladimir regional governor Alexander Avdeyev confirmed that the strike had caused a fire. Independent Russian outlet ASTRA published photos showing flames and thick smoke over the city.

Often called “Russia's Google,” Yandex runs the country's leading search engine and is a central player in Russia's artificial intelligence development. The Vladimir facility, about 180 km east of Moscow, is reported to house one of the company's supercomputers, used to train AI models and power its cloud services.

Three data centres in four days

The Vladimir strike capped a punishing week for Yandex:

• October 8: A drone strike sparked a fire at the Sasovo data centre in the Ryazan region, forcing a full shutdown. Sasovo is reported to host Yandex's first two supercomputers, and the company said it could not confirm whether the equipment could be repaired.
• October 9: Yandex said Ukrainian drones hit its data centre in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, putting it partly out of action.
• October 11: The Vladimir data centre was completely shut down.

Services knocked offline

The damage rippled across Yandex's business. More than 80 Yandex Cloud services stopped working, including the YandexGPT AI service for developers, databases, storage and business tools. Yandex said the cloud platform was running with limited functionality while it worked to restore systems.

The combined outages also hit consumer services, including web search, ride-hailing, online shopping and food delivery, with disruptions reported as far away as neighbouring Kazakhstan. Yandex shares fell nearly 4% on the Moscow Exchange after the second strike.

One striking side effect was spotted online. An analysis of Cloudflare Radar data by Euronews found that automated traffic from Yandex's network fell by about 94% on Sunday compared with its late-September average.

A new front in the war

The attacks show data centres becoming targets as Russia and Ukraine escalate strikes on each other's technology infrastructure. They came the same weekend US President Donald Trump announced an “energy ceasefire” between the two countries, which Moscow has yet to confirm.

What to watch

The key questions now are how quickly Yandex can restore its cloud platform, whether the Sasovo equipment can be saved, and whether further strikes follow. With three of the company's major data centres hit in a single week, the attacks are a serious blow to Russia's AI ambitions and to the businesses that depend on Yandex every day.