Drone attack shuts a third Yandex data centre in Russia in 4 days
The site is the third of Yandex’s five large data centres knocked out in four days, after Sasovo and Kaluga.
October 12, 2026 - 8:22 am
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Yandex has lost a third major data centre in four days. The Russian tech company stated on Sunday that a drone attack had left its site in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow, out of service, Reuters reported.
Nobody was harmed, Yandex confirmed, although some of its services are currently unavailable for users. The report does not identify who deployed the drones, and we have not independently verified the extent of the damage.
Three of the company’s five large data centres have now been affected. Alongside Vladimir, Yandex operates sites in Sasovo, Kaluga, Ivanteevka, and Mytishchi, according to DatacenterDynamics.
The initial strike occurred on Thursday when a fire erupted at the Sasovo hub in the Ryazan region, resulting in operations ceasing there. On Friday, Ukrainian drones partially disabled the Kaluga site, located southwest of Moscow.
Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, confirmed the Kaluga attack and framed it as retaliation for Russian strikes. Furthermore, Kyiv has relied on inexpensive long-range drones to reach targets deep inside Russia this year.
The Sasovo outage is particularly significant for Yandex's AI operations. That hub houses two of the three supercomputers the company utilizes to develop its YandexGPT model. The firm has yet to determine if the equipment at Sasovo can be salvaged.
Firms utilizing Yandex’s cloud services have also been impacted. Following the Sasovo strike, websites belonging to Russian Railways and mobile operator MegaFon went offline, according to independent outlet Meduza.
Yandex stated that rival cloud providers had agreed to facilitate a swift transfer of data and applications for its clients.
These attacks on Yandex follow a month of Russian strikes against Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications sites, some in central Kyiv. One such attack cut internet access for approximately 100,000 households, and Ukraine’s digital minister informed Reuters that the country is relocating its digital systems underground.
Data centres have also emerged as military targets in the Middle East. In March, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards listed 18 US tech firms as potential targets. The UAE is now partitioning its Stargate data centre campus after Iran identified it as a target.
Back in Moscow, Yandex shares dipped over 4% following the Kaluga strike. Maryana Lazaricheva, head of equity research at T-Investments, told Reuters that Yandex might shift some operations to its remaining sites. However, she noted that this option would disappear if the attacks persist.