Drones have hit a third Yandex data centre in about a week
Key takeaways
- Yandex said operations at its Vladimir data centre were completely suspended after a drone attack on 11 October, with no injuries reported.
- It is the third Yandex site hit in about a week, after Sasovo, which houses two of the three supercomputers used for its AI model, and Kaluga.
- Yandex runs five large data centres in Russia, so three of them have now been struck.
Last updated: 12 October 2026
Three of Yandex's five large data centres have been hit by drones in about a week. The latest is Vladimir, east of Moscow, which Yandex said on Sunday 11 October had been shut down after an attack. Al Jazeera reports no injuries.
Yandex said operations at the site "have been completely suspended" and that the platform was running in emergency mode. It also warned that "the remaining resource configuration is considered unstable" and that technical support communications could be disrupted. Al Jazeera's report does not say who carried out the Vladimir attack.
How the three strikes line up
Sasovo, southeast of Moscow, was shut down first. Al Jazeera attributes that attack to Ukraine and says the site houses two of the three supercomputers used to develop Yandex's AI model. Data Center Dynamics, citing Reuters, reports the same figure, and says Yandex could not yet confirm whether the Sasovo equipment can be restored.
Kaluga, southwest of Moscow, was hit by Ukrainian drones on Friday. Yandex said a drone attack had damaged part of the infrastructure there, "completely knocking out several modules", and Data Center Dynamics reported that its status page listed a power outage in one availability zone and slower Object Storage in four zones. After the Sasovo strike, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said: "We always respond in mirror-like fashion."
Why it matters for cloud resilience
Yandex is heavily involved in Russia's AI development and is sometimes called Russia's Google. It runs five large data centres, in Vladimir, Sasovo, Ivanteevka, Mytishchi and Kaluga Oblast, so a majority of them have now been struck.
Al Jazeera adds that Russia has hit several Ukrainian data centres and telecom facilities over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv. Taken together, the strikes make a plain point: compute is physical, and a cloud region is a building with an address. That is true whether the building holds a national AI programme or an ordinary commercial cloud. At home scale the same logic is why a UPS for a NAS or home server is worth owning.
Watch whether Yandex can bring Sasovo back, and whether its two remaining large sites, Ivanteevka and Mytishchi, come under attack.
