Drone Strike Hits Yandex Data Centre in First Major Attack on Russian Data Hub

Drones hit a data centre owned by Russia’s Yandex on Thursday, forcing the country’s leading technology and AI company to suspend operations at one of its five large data hubs — in the first major attack of its kind on a Russian data facility since the war with Ukraine began.

Yandex said the attack on its Sasovo hub in the Ryazan region, southeast of Moscow, caused a fire and forced it to suspend operations at the site, which hosts tens of thousands of servers. The company said it was restoring affected services, though its core consumer services were not affected.

“The scale of the damage to the infrastructure is still being assessed,” Yandex said in a statement. “For the moment, we cannot confirm whether it is possible to restore the data centre equipment in Sasovo.”

FAKTA

• Target: Yandex data centre in Sasovo, Ryazan region (about 300 km east of Moscow)
• When: Overnight into Thursday, October 8, 2026
• Damage: Fire broke out; operations suspended; tens of thousands of servers affected; some Yandex services unavailable
• Casualties: None reported
• Significance: First major drone attack on a Russian data hub since the war began; the site houses two of Yandex’s three Nvidia A100-based supercomputers used to train its AI models
• Attribution: Yandex did not name the origin; the head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation claimed Kyiv was responsible

Supercomputers at risk

The Sasovo facility is especially significant because Yandex previously said it houses two of its three supercomputers built around Nvidia A100 chips, which it uses to train its YandexGPT large AI model. Yandex declined to say whether the supercomputers were damaged.

On its Yandex Cloud service page, the company advised customers there were problems with the electricity supply to one data centre “zone” and recommended using others. Several Russian online services reported technical problems on Thursday as the outage rippled through infrastructure. Yandex later told cloud customers it would not be possible to restore service in the affected availability zone “in the near future.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking to reporters in Kyiv, did not refer specifically to the Yandex strike but said Ukraine was “mirroring” Russian attacks on data centres. “We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” he said, adding that Ukraine could not share all the details.

A new front in the strikes war

Mutual long-range drone attacks by Russia and Ukraine this year have gradually spread across the economy — from energy facilities and refineries to ports, grain vessels, e-commerce warehouses and, most recently, data centres. Russia has conducted a strike campaign on Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications infrastructure over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv.

Ryazan regional governor Pavel Malkov said on Telegram that two Ukrainian drones had been shot down over the region overnight, noting that the roof of a business caught fire in the Sasovo area. Russia’s defence ministry said its air defences shot down 399 Ukrainian drones over 19 regions overnight.

In August, President Vladimir Putin gave the state the power to take control of critically important infrastructure deemed poorly protected from drone attacks, and Russian media reported that businesses are discussing developing data centres in countries Moscow considers “friendly”. Read more on watannews.dk.