Two major data centers operated by Russian technology company Yandex were hit by drones over two days, shutting down one facility and partially disabling another, according to Vesti Baku.
Yandex said on Oct. 9 that part of the infrastructure at its data center in Kaluga had been damaged. Emergency crews and company specialists were assessing the damage, while several modules remained out of service. The company said no one was injured at the facility itself.
Kaluga regional Governor Vladislav Shapsha said nine people were injured during the overnight attack across the region and five were hospitalized in stable condition. Those figures covered the wider regional attack, not only the data center.
Second Strike in Two Days
A day earlier, a fire forced Yandex’s data center in Sasovo, in Russia’s Ryazan region, to halt operations completely. The company said it could not yet confirm whether the damaged equipment there could be restored.
Reuters reported that the Sasovo facility housed two of Yandex’s three supercomputers used to train the YandexGPT large language model. Yandex did not say whether the computing systems themselves had been damaged.
Ukrainian weapons manufacturer Firepoint said FP-1 one-way attack drones were used in the strike on the Kaluga facility. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the operation as retaliation for Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers. No independent assessment of the full extent of the damage was immediately available.
Services and Business Impact
Yandex warned that some services could face disruptions, including payment processing for orders through Yandex Eats. After the first strike, outages were also reported by the Cian property platform, several Russian media outlets, electronic document-management providers and some banking clients.
The company arranged with Selectel, K2Cloud and VK Cloud to accelerate backup capacity and the transfer of corporate customers’ resources. Publicly available information shows that Yandex operates five major data centers, two of which have now been attacked.
The strikes mark a further expansion of targets in the Russia-Ukraine war. After attacks on energy facilities, oil refineries, ports and warehouses, the conflict has reached infrastructure that supports widely used digital services and the operations of hundreds of thousands of businesses.