Ukraine has struck two major data centres run by Russian technology giant Yandex on consecutive days, widening its campaign against Russia’s infrastructure from refineries and ports to the digital backbone millions of Russians use every day.
The first strike, overnight into October 8, hit Yandex’s hub at Sasovo, southeast of Moscow, sparking a fire and forcing a complete shutdown, according to the company. A second attack on Friday partly disabled a facility in the Kaluga region, southwest of the capital. Yandex said no employees were injured, but acknowledged it could not yet say when the damaged equipment might be restored.
The Sasovo site is no ordinary server farm. It houses tens of thousands of servers and, according to reports, two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its artificial intelligence models, including its flagship language model. The company has not confirmed whether those machines survived.
The disruption rippled outward quickly. Internet monitor NetBlocks reported Yandex connectivity falling to around 70 percent of normal levels, while outage trackers logged more than 1,300 user reports affecting cloud, document and spreadsheet services. One startup founder told reporters his dating app’s 8,000 users had been locked out since Thursday, with its backup database unreachable. Yandex shares fell more than 4 percent in Moscow trading.
Ukrainian arms maker Firepoint said Kyiv used its FP-1 one-way attack drones against the Kaluga site. Yandex, for its part, described data centres as the “iron heart” of services Russians rely on for navigation, food delivery, music and business operations — and said its teams were working around the clock to keep them running.
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