A drone attack caused a fire at a Yandex data center in the town of Sasovo in Russia’s Ryazan region overnight, forcing the facility to shut down completely and disrupting services for users across the country. The strike, which occurred on the night of October 7 to 8, marks the first confirmed attack on a major Russian data hub since Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Yandex, often described as Russia’s Google, confirmed the incident in statements to multiple news outlets. The company said the fire affected part of the data center’s infrastructure and that no employees were injured.
‘A drone attack caused a fire at the Yandex data center in Sasovo, affecting part of its infrastructure,’ a Yandex spokesperson told AFP. ‘There are no casualties, and emergency services are on site dealing with the aftermath. The data center has stopped operating entirely, and some Yandex services may be unavailable to users.’
In a later statement, the company’s press office said it was ‘still assessing the extent of the damage to our infrastructure’ and that ‘at this stage, we cannot confirm whether the equipment at our Sasovo data center can be restored.’
Location and Strategic Significance
The data center is located in Sasovo, a town approximately 300 kilometers (186 miles) east of Moscow and more than 500 kilometers from Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. The facility sits on the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant, a factory that produces high-precision CNC metal-cutting machines used in Russian defense, aviation, and heavy industry sectors.
According to Yandex’s own materials, the Sasovo site houses two of the company’s three most powerful supercomputers, named Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. The Chervonenkis system ranks 19th on the global TOP500 list with a performance of 21.53 petaflops. These systems are used to train neural network models with billions of parameters, including YandexGPT, the company’s generative AI model.
The Sasta plant has been under international sanctions since 2022, including measures from the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
Regional Response and Damage Reports
Ryazan regional governor Pavel Malkov said on Telegram that two Ukrainian drones had been shot down over the region overnight. He noted that ‘the roof of a business caught fire’ in the Sasovo area and that windows were blown out in several private homes. Preliminary reports indicated no casualties.
The Russian Defense Ministry said its air defenses shot down 399 Ukrainian drones over 19 regions, including Ryazan, as well as over the Black Sea and Crimea.
Ukraine has not officially claimed responsibility for the strike. However, Andriy Kovalenko, former head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, posted an image on Telegram purporting to show the attack.
‘Two can play at this game. Ukrainian forces struck a Yandex data center in the Ryazan region,’ Kovalenko wrote.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later addressed the strikes in a post on X. ‘We continue to respond to Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian territory and we do so with great precision. Another data center was hit as well, our symmetrical response,’ he said.
Service Disruptions and Market Impact
Following the attack, users across Russia reported widespread outages. Downdetector Russia, a website that monitors internet disruptions, showed a large spike in complaints beginning in the early hours of Thursday, with approximately 1,300 reports logged within 24 hours. The complaints focused on cloud computing resources, servers, Yandex Disk, Yandex Documents, and Yandex Sheets.
Russian media reported major outages throughout the day, with users unable to access websites of key transport services and online shopping platforms. The list of affected services included the video streaming platform Ivi, a digital banking service, Russian Railways, a dating app, a real estate listings aggregator, and the website of a leading Russian Premier League football club.
Yandex Cloud confirmed the incident on its status page, reporting power supply problems in the ‘ru-central1-b’ availability zone associated with Sasovo. The company warned that the outage could affect other parts of its cloud network and advised customers to move some services to other locations while engineers worked to restore operations.
On the Moscow Exchange, Yandex shares fell by more than 3 percent during the morning trading session on October 8, dropping to 3,570 rubles per share.
Second Strike Targets Kaluga Facility
Less than 48 hours after the Sasovo attack, a second Yandex data center was hit. On the morning of October 9, drones struck the company’s facility in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow. According to Yandex’s press service, several modules of the Kaluga installation were rendered inoperable.
The Kaluga data center, which was connected to the grid in 2024 with a maximum capacity of 49 megawatts, is described as the largest in Yandex’s network. The company did not disclose how many servers were operational at the time of the attack.
Reuters and AFP reported that no one was injured in the Kaluga strike. Local authorities in the Kaluga region reportedly said nine people were wounded, though this figure was not confirmed by Yandex or independent sources.
Firepoint, a Ukrainian drone manufacturer, claimed its attack drones were used in the Kaluga strike. The drones are described as one-way attack models designed to crash directly into their targets.
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Context of Escalating Infrastructure War
The strikes on Yandex facilities follow a series of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers in late September. On September 25, Russian forces struck a data center belonging to the Ukrainian company Datagroup in Kyiv. The next day, Russia hit the Cosmonova data center, also in Kyiv, disrupting television broadcasting.
At the time, the Russian Defense Ministry said the targeted data centers ‘ensure the processing and transmission of intelligence data in the interests of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.’ Russian officials threatened Kyiv with a ‘digital detox.’
Ukraine’s strikes on Yandex infrastructure appear to be a direct response to those attacks. The targeting of data centers represents a shift in the broader conflict, with digital infrastructure now treated as a legitimate military objective by both sides.
The Sasovo data center has been in operation since 2014. According to earlier statements by local officials, Yandex invested more than 6 billion rubles (approximately $75 million) in the facility during its first decade of operation. The loss of thousands of servers poses significant challenges for replacement, particularly given Western export restrictions on advanced electronics to Russia.
As of October 10, Yandex has not provided a timeline for restoring operations at either the Sasovo or Kaluga data centers. The company said it is continuing to assess the condition of its infrastructure and that it is ‘very difficult to say’ when the equipment at the data centers will be back up and running.
