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

Ukrainian drones struck a data centre owned by Russian technology giant Yandex in the early hours of Thursday, causing a major fire and forcing a full shutdown of the facility in what is the first confirmed major attack on a Russian data hub since the war began.

The affected site, located in Sasovo in Russia’s Ryazan region southeast of Moscow, is one of Yandex’s five large data centres and houses tens of thousands of servers. Yandex confirmed the incident in a statement, saying a drone attack caused a fire affecting part of its infrastructure.

“There are no casualties, and emergency services are on site dealing with the aftermath. The data centre has stopped operating entirely, and some Yandex services may be unavailable to users,” a Yandex spokesperson said.

The company later added that it was “still assessing the extent of the damage to our infrastructure” and could not confirm whether the equipment at the Sasovo facility could be restored.

Ryazan regional governor Pavel Malkov said on Telegram that two Ukrainian drones had been shot down over the region overnight and that “the roof of a business caught fire” in the Sasovo area.

Andriy Kovalenko, former head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, appeared to confirm Kyiv’s involvement. “Two can play at this game. Ukrainian forces struck a Yandex data centre in the Ryazan region,” he wrote on Telegram.

In a separate post, Kovalenko said the “generals who plan operations against Ukraine… keep forgetting to say that a response will certainly come”.

The attack triggered widespread service disruptions across Russia. Downdetector Russia recorded a large spike in user complaints beginning in the early hours of Thursday, with users unable to access key transport services and online shopping platforms.

Russia’s online monitoring service Detector404 said it received 58,268 user complaints over the past day.

Multiple services reported technical issues, including real estate aggregator Cian, book portal Litmarket, and the websites of Russian Railways and football club Spartak Moscow.

On its Yandex Cloud service website, the company advised customers of problems with the electricity supply to one data centre “zone” and recommended using others.

The disruptions began at approximately 1:31 am local time and affected cloud computing, networks, databases, storage, artificial intelligence systems and other services.

Yandex, often dubbed “Russia’s Google,” operates the country’s most popular search engine as well as YandexGPT, one of Russia’s leading generative AI models.

The Sasovo data centre is reported to host two of Yandex’s three supercomputers, including the Chervonenkis system, which ranked 19th globally in the TOP500 list with a performance of 21.53 petaflops.

Yandex declined to say whether the supercomputers were affected.

The facility shares an industrial complex with the Sasta machine-tool factory, which manufactures precision equipment used by Russia’s military-industrial sector and has been under international sanctions since 2024.

It remains unclear whether the Yandex data centre, the Sasta plant, or both were the intended target.

Yandex shares on the Moscow Exchange fell 3.4 percent following the attack, dropping to 3,570 rubles per share.

The strike follows a series of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications infrastructure in recent weeks, including targets in central Kyiv.

Some Ukrainian data centres were forced to suspend operations after sustaining damage, while 100,000 households suffered temporary internet outages after one attack.

Ukraine’s digital minister told Reuters last month that the country was moving digital infrastructure underground in response to Russian attacks.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in August gave the state the power to take control of critically important infrastructure if it is deemed poorly protected from drone attacks.

Russia’s RBC news outlet reported that businesses were in talks with the government on developing data centres in countries deemed “friendly” by Moscow.