Major Yandex data center in Russia hit by Ukrainian drone strike

A major data center operated by Russian technology giant Yandex was disrupted on Thursday following a reported Ukrainian drone strike.

According to Russian state media citing Yandex, the facility located in Sasovo in Russia's Ryazan region was shut down following the attack. No injuries were reported.

One of Russia's largest internet and cloud computing companies, Yandex operates five data centers across the country.

The company acknowledged a power outage at one of its facilities in a statement on Telegram but did not publicly link the disruption to a drone strike.

Yandex said it had completed the necessary work to move workloads to other facilities, which were operating normally, although some restrictions remained.

"The ability to create new resources in our cloud infrastructure may currently be limited," the company said, advising customers to move their workloads elsewhere.

Internet monitoring group NetBlocks reported a significant disruption to Yandex's network on Thursday, with connectivity falling to around 70 percent of normal levels.

The outage reportedly affected Yandex Cloud, the company's cloud computing platform, disrupting computing resources, networks, data storage, databases and other services. Russian media also reported problems with products that rely on the company's infrastructure, including Yandex Disk and Yandex Documents.

Several Russian websites reportedly became inaccessible following the incident, including a social media management platform and the Ryazan regional edition of the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Photos and videos shared by eyewitnesses on Telegram appeared to show a fire at a machine-tool manufacturing plant that houses one of the company’s data centers. The plant has been under British sanctions since 2024 over its involvement with Russia's defense sector.

Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses intercepted Ukrainian drones over several regions overnight, including Ryazan, but local authorities did not report any damage.

Ukraine's military has not publicly commented on the reported strike, and it remains unclear whether the data center, the manufacturing plant or both were the intended targets.

The incident comes as Russia has stepped up attacks on Ukraine's digital infrastructure, including data centers and telecommunications facilities.

Moscow began striking Ukrainian data centers in September, claiming the facilities were being used to support Ukraine's armed forces.

Russian strikes late last month damaged at least six Ukrainian data centers, including facilities operated by MiroHost, Parkovy, Data Group, Utels and Pautina. Infrastructure belonging to major telecommunications providers, including Kyivstar and Ukrtelecom, was also hit.

An attack on September 23 disrupted fixed-line internet access for approximately 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding region, according to Ukrainian officials. Some affected facilities were forced to shut down completely.

Ukrainian officials have said they are working to make the country's digital infrastructure more resilient to Russian attacks by moving equipment underground, transferring data to the cloud and relocating some infrastructure abroad.