Yandex says second drone attack disables Kaluga data-centre modules

Yandex said on 9 October that a drone attack had completely disabled several modules at its data centre in Russia’s Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, warning that some services could be disrupted. The announcement, reported by Reuters, marks the second attack on one of the company’s data centres in two days.

The company said nobody was injured in the Kaluga attack. Its warning did not establish which services were affected or the extent of actual outages on Friday. The Reuters report also did not establish who carried out that attack, or provide a count or description of the disabled modules.

Sasovo data centre stopped operating after fire

The latest announcement follows a strike on 8 October at Yandex’s Sasovo data centre in the Ryazan region, southeast of Moscow. Reuters reported that a Ukrainian drone hit that facility. In separate reporting, AFP obtained a direct account from a Yandex spokesperson, who confirmed a drone attack without specifying its origin.

“A drone attack caused a fire at the Yandex data centre in Sasovo, affecting part of its infrastructure,” the spokesperson told AFP. The company said there were no casualties and that emergency services were dealing with the aftermath. It also said the data centre had stopped operating entirely and some services might be unavailable.

Ryazan governor Pavel Malkov said two Ukrainian drones had been shot down over the region overnight and that the roof of a business had caught fire in the Sasovo area, AFP reported. His account did not identify Yandex, making the company’s own statement the more specific account of the facility’s shutdown.

What is known about Yandex service disruption

AFP reported a large spike in complaints on Downdetector Russia beginning early on Thursday. Those reports indicate users were experiencing problems, but they do not establish how many customers were affected or whether every reported outage had the same cause. They also do not measure the consequences of Friday’s separate Kaluga attack.

In its 8 October report, specialist publication Data Center Dynamics said Yandex Cloud’s status dashboard showed a power outage in the ru-central-b availability zone. That was a Thursday observation: it does not establish whether the same outage continued on Friday or when full service would return.

The potential audience for disruption is broad. AFP describes Yandex as the operator of Russia’s most popular search engine, alongside food-ordering and taxi applications used by tens of millions across the Russian-speaking world. That user base is not a count of people affected by either attack, and neither report supplies such a total.

Why the Sasovo site matters for Yandex AI

Reuters reported that the Ryazan facility houses two of the three supercomputers used to develop Yandex’s AI model. Their location makes the damage assessment significant for its AI infrastructure, but the report does not establish that either supercomputer was destroyed or permanently disabled. It gives no measured effect on AI development.

Yandex’s technical description names three supercomputers—Chervonenkis, Galushkin and Lyapunov—dedicated to machine-learning tasks. The company links machine learning to search results, its AI assistant and translated video. That explains the computing infrastructure’s relevance across its products, although the page is not a current inventory or an assessment of attack damage.

Data Center Dynamics reported that Yandex operated five large Russian data centres, in Vladimir, Sasovo, Ivanteevka, Mytishchi and Kaluga Oblast. The two attacks therefore concern separate locations within a wider network. The reporting does not establish how much computing capacity remains available or whether workloads have been transferred elsewhere.

Data centres face attacks on both sides of the war

Reuters placed the attacks within an expansion of strikes on economic infrastructure by Russia and Ukraine. It reported that Russia had targeted Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications infrastructure over the preceding month, including in central Kyiv.

“We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday, according to Reuters. He referred to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres and said Ukraine was responding, while declining to share details. His general statement did not provide detailed confirmation of responsibility for each individual strike.