THE CRUNCH
Ukrainian drone strikes hit two of Yandex's five Russian data centers on October 8 and 9, disrupting the company's cloud platform and a range of Russian online services. The Sasovo facility in the Ryazan region was shut down after the attack, with eyewitness footage appearing to show a fire at the machine-tool plant that houses it. Yandex acknowledged a power outage and said it had moved workloads to other facilities, though it warned that creating new resources in its cloud may remain limited. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the strikes as a "symmetrical response" to Russian attacks on Ukraine's data centers, which have damaged at least six Ukrainian facilities since late September.
Internet monitoring group NetBlocks measured Yandex's connectivity at around 70 percent of normal levels, and users reported problems with services including Yandex Mail, Disk and Market, alongside corporate systems run by T-Bank, Ozon and Wildberries. Yandex itself said key consumer services stayed operational. Russia's Defence Ministry said its air defences intercepted drones over several regions including Ryazan, but local authorities reported no damage, and Ukraine's military has not publicly commented.
The Sasovo site reportedly houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers, Nvidia A100-based systems named Chervonenkis and Lyapunov that have been used to train YandexGPT, Russia's leading large language model. The company has not disclosed whether the machines were affected, and their fate remains unclear. Western sanctions already bar Yandex from upgrading the systems, and Tom's Hardware suggests that if they are destroyed, the company may have to turn to Chinese infrastructure for future model training.
The strike lands as both countries target each other's computing infrastructure. Russia began striking Ukrainian data centers in September, claiming they supported the armed forces, and a September 23 attack disrupted fixed-line internet for roughly 100,000 households around Kyiv. Ukrainian officials are responding by moving equipment underground and shifting data to the cloud.