A drone attack overnight started a fire at a data center run by Yandex, Russia's biggest technology company, and forced it to shut the facility down completely, the company said Thursday.
What happened
The data center sits in Sasovo, a town in the Ryazan region southeast of Moscow. Yandex told the state news agency TASS that the fire damaged part of the site's infrastructure, that no one was injured and that some of its services might be unavailable while crews deal with the aftermath. Speaking to Reuters, the company said its core consumer services were not affected.
Ryazan Governor Pavel Malkov said air defenses shot down two drones over the region overnight. He reported that the roof of a local enterprise in the Sasovsky district caught fire and that windows were blown out in several private homes, with no casualties reported so far, according to Anadolu Agency.
The Ukrainian tech outlet dev.ua reported that the fire broke out on the grounds of the Sasta machine tool plant, where the data center is located, and that users saw widespread outages in Yandex services on the Downdetector tracking site. Ukrainian authorities had not commented on the strike as of Anadolu's report.
Cloud customers told to move
On its Yandex Cloud status channel, the company said power problems were affecting one of its availability zones, known as ru-central1-b. As of 8:26 a.m. Moscow time, that zone was still down, though Yandex said it had finished shifting the load to its other zones, TASS reported. The company warned that creating new cloud resources could be limited for now and advised customers to use other zones.
Why it matters
Reuters described it as the first confirmed major drone attack on a Russian data center. It comes after weeks of Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers and logistics warehouses, according to Al Jazeera. Yandex also runs YandexGPT, one of Russia's leading generative AI models.
The strike was part of a wider overnight wave. Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses downed 399 Ukrainian drones over 19 regions, the Black Sea and Crimea. Both countries have stepped up long-range attacks in recent months, and each denies deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure.
The same day, Ukrainian officials reported that a Russian attack on two buses in Kramatorsk killed at least 33 people, and that the death toll from Wednesday's missile strike on an apartment building in Pryluky had risen to 22, including five children.