AI news · Russia · data centres
Third drone strike in a week shuts a Yandex data centre
The Vladimir site went fully offline on 11 October, and Yandex Cloud, YandexGPT and dozens of other services went down with it.
Yandex suspended all work at its data centre in Vladimir, east of Moscow, after a drone strike on Sunday 11 October 2026, the company said on Telegram, Al Jazeera reports. No one was hurt. Yandex told customers to switch on their disaster-recovery plans and called its remaining capacity unstable.
It is the third strike on the group in four days. On 8 October drones shut its Sasovo hub, as this site reported; the site is home to two of the three supercomputers behind its AI model, Al Jazeera reports, and a site in the Kaluga region was partly knocked out on 9 October. The BBC reports that Kyiv says it targets sources of revenue for Moscow’s war effort, while Russia has hit Ukrainian data centres too.
The outage spread well beyond Yandex. The Kyiv Post reports that more than 80 services went down, including the Alice assistant, Yandex Cloud storage and databases, and the YandexGPT and SpeechKit interfaces, with users of banking, taxi and retail apps reporting failures. Citing Telegram channels, it puts the site at 40 to 50 megawatts.
Data centres are now front-line targets in this war, and every business that rents AI capacity in a conflict zone carries that risk in its uptime.
Earlier on this story: Drone strike shuts a Yandex data centre in Russia
Sources
- Al Jazeera: Russia’s Yandex says data centre in Vladimir shut down after drone attack. Checked
- BBC News: Ukraine strikes Yandex data centre in third attack on Russian tech giant. Checked
- Kyiv Post: Drones Hit Yandex Data Center in Vladimir, Russia, Disrupting Over 80 Services. Checked
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