Three drone strikes disrupt Yandex data centres in four days

• Yandex says its Sasovo data centre was seriously damaged and shut after an overnight attack on 7–8 October.
• A second strike disabled several modules at the company’s Kaluga centre on 9 October.
• On 11 October, Yandex reported damage and a complete shutdown at its Vladimir centre.
• Yandex Cloud said two availability zones were unavailable and urged customers to use alternative recovery plans.

Yandex has reported drone damage at three data centres in four days. The latest incident, at Vladimir on Sunday, forced the facility to stop operating and left Yandex Cloud running in emergency mode, according to the company’s incident updates.¹

The sequence began overnight on 7–8 October, when a fire followed an attack at the Sasovo centre in Russia’s Ryazan region. Yandex said the site was seriously damaged and completely shut down. On 9 October, it reported that an attack on its Kaluga centre had put part of the infrastructure out of service, with several modules disabled. That was not a shutdown of the entire Kaluga facility.²

Independent analysis of photographs and video placed the Sasovo fire at the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant, where Yandex’s data centre occupies part of the former premises. The images help locate the fire; they do not establish which part of the site was intended as the target.³

The disruption matters beyond the buildings themselves. Yandex Cloud’s status page said on Sunday that availability zones ru-central1-a and ru-central1-b were unavailable and that the platform was in emergency mode. The company reported that some services remained available in other zones, while warning customers to prepare alternative recovery plans.¹

Sasovo is also reported to house two of Yandex’s three supercomputers used to train neural networks: Lyapunov and Chervonenkis. Yandex has not said what condition they are in. Their reported location makes the shutdown significant for the company’s AI work, but does not establish that either machine was damaged or is unusable.⁴

Yandex said it was assessing damage and possible ways to resume operations at Vladimir. In its 9 October update on Sasovo and Kaluga, it said it could not reliably estimate when equipment at those centres would be back online. It reported no employee injuries at either site.²

Footnotes

1. Yandex Cloud incident update, 11 October 2026 ↩ ↩²

2. Yandex statement on its data centres, 9 October 2026; Associated Press report on the Kaluga strike ↩ ↩²

3. Meduza’s report on the Sasovo fire and site ↩

4. Meduza’s report on the Sasovo supercomputers ↩