Yandex Data Centre Disrupted After Reported Drone Strike, Showing How Physical Events Can Take Cloud Services Offline

A major data centre run by Russian technology company Yandex was disrupted on Thursday following a reported Ukrainian drone strike. Russian state media, citing Yandex, said the facility in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, was shut down. No injuries were reported. Yandex acknowledged a power outage at one of its sites but did not publicly link it to a drone strike. Ukraine's military has not commented, and it is unclear whether the data centre, the manufacturing plant that houses it, or both were the intended targets.

Internet monitoring group NetBlocks reported that Yandex's network connectivity fell to around 70 percent of normal levels. The outage reportedly affected Yandex Cloud, including computing, networking, storage and databases, as well as products such as Yandex Disk and Yandex Documents. Several Russian websites also became inaccessible. Yandex said it had moved workloads to other facilities, which were operating normally, though some restrictions remained. It warned that creating new cloud resources may be limited and advised customers to move their workloads elsewhere.

The incident comes as Russia has stepped up attacks on Ukraine's digital infrastructure, including data centres and telecommunications facilities. For businesses everywhere, the episode is a reminder that cloud services rely on physical buildings, and that a problem at one site can ripple out to the many services that depend on it.