AI news · Russia · infrastructure
Drone strike shuts a Yandex data centre in Russia
A fire at the Sasovo site forced Yandex, the maker of YandexGPT, to suspend it, and Yandex Cloud users saw outages.
Drones struck a Yandex data centre in Sasovo, in Russia’s Ryazan region, overnight into Thursday 8 October 2026, starting a fire and forcing the company to halt the site entirely, Yandex told CNBC. It reported no casualties and said its main services kept running. YandexGPT, among Russia’s main generative AI models, is a Yandex product.
Reuters calls it the first confirmed major attack on a Russian data hub since the war began. It follows Russian strikes on at least eight major data centres in Kyiv since late September, The Moscow Times reports. Ukraine has not claimed the attack.
The damage reached business customers. Yandex Cloud reported power problems in one availability zone and advised customers to use others, Reuters says. Downdetector logged more than 1,300 reports of trouble with Yandex Cloud, Documents and Tables, and Yandex shares fell more than 3.4% in Moscow, according to The Moscow Times. Yandex describes Sasovo as its largest data centre, The Kyiv Independent notes. The site shares ground with the Sasta machine-tool plant, which the UK sanctioned in 2024. No one has said which of the two the drones were aimed at.
Data centres are now being hit on both sides of the war, and Yandex Cloud’s advice to switch zones shows how fast one can go dark.
Sources
- CNBC: “Russia’s Yandex halts operations at data center after drone strike”. Checked
- The Moscow Times: “Ukrainian Drones Hit Yandex Data Center, Industrial Facilities Across Russia”. Checked
- The Kyiv Independent: “Massive internet outage in Russia after Ukraine reportedly hits largest Yandex data center in drone attack”. Checked
- Reuters (NBC News): “Drones hit Yandex data center in first major attack on Russian data hub”. Checked
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