Drone Strikes on Three Yandex Data Centers Show How Cloud Dependence Can Disrupt Daily Business

A third Yandex data center in Russia was hit by Ukrainian drones overnight on Sunday, this time in Vladimir. Yandex said the facility has shut down completely, the remaining infrastructure is unstable, and the platform is operating in emergency mode. Earlier strikes hit sites in Sasovo (Ryazan region) on October 7-8 and in Kaluga on October 9. Two facilities have been shut down completely and a third has had infrastructure damaged. Together, the three sites have a combined capacity of about 115 megawatts.

The effects have spread well beyond Yandex itself. Yandex Cloud supplies computing infrastructure to thousands of businesses, and the Russian internet watchdog reports that users have had trouble with email, taxi bookings, food orders and payments through Yandex Pay. The Alice voice assistant and some smart home devices have reportedly stopped working in some households. More than a dozen third-party services hosted on Yandex infrastructure were also reportedly affected, including retailers, internet providers, fitness businesses and the Russian segment of TikTok.

Reports say two of the sites house supercomputers used for AI training, including one called Galushkin. Yandex has not said whether any supercomputers were damaged. No employees were reported injured at the Kaluga site. The episode shows how many businesses can be knocked offline at once when a single provider's facilities fail, whatever the cause.