Ukraine Strikes Russia’s ‘Google’: Yandex’s Massive Data Centre Hit in Kaluga Drone Attack

Ukraine struck two data centres operated by Russian technology company Yandex on consecutive days, shutting down one facility and disabling parts of another. The attacks disrupted Yandex Cloud services and affected other websites.

The attacks targeted facilities in Russia’s Ryazan and Kaluga regions on Oct. 8 and 9. Yandex is still assessing the damage, and the condition of two AI supercomputers housed at the first site remains unknown.

Ukraine’s Two Drone Strikes Damaged Yandex Data Centres

“On the night of October 7th to 8th, the Yandex data center in Sasovo was seriously damaged in a drone attack. It has been completely shut down,” Yandex said in its Oct. 9 statement.

The site houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI models. Yandex has not confirmed whether those machines were damaged and said it could not determine whether the facility’s equipment could be restored.

“This morning, another of our data centers, in Kaluga, was attacked. Part of its infrastructure is out of service,” Yandex said on Oct. 9. Ukrainian arms maker Fire Point said its FP-1 one-way attack drones were used and described the facility as Yandex’s largest data centre.

Fire Point put its design capacity at 63 megawatts, according to reporting by the Institute for the Study of War. Kaluga’s governor said nine people were injured in the regional drone attack.

Which Russian Cloud Services Were Disrupted?

The Sasovo strike took the Yandex Cloud availability zone known as ru-central1-b offline. Yandex’s status page listed 32 cloud services as unavailable in that zone and advised customers to move workloads to other zones where possible. The company also arranged assistance from other cloud providers to help customers migrate or restore services from backups.

Reports linked disruptions at Russian Railways’ website, shopping and real-estate platforms, and some media sites to the incident.

The company has said its teams are working to restore operations and maintain services through its remaining infrastructure. Its cloud status updates also said other availability zones continued operating, although capacity and resource creation were subject to restrictions. Yandex shares fell more than 4% in Moscow after the attacks, according to Reuters.

Damage Affect Yandex’s AI Systems

The presence of two AI supercomputers at Sasovo has raised questions about the impact on Yandex’s model development. But a facility shutdown does not prove that the machines were destroyed or that AI training has stopped.

Yandex Cloud’s status updates reported that Yandex AI Studio models and components were operating normally as of Oct. 9, while some features involving DeepSeek models remained affected.

“We are continuing to assess the condition of our infrastructure. For now, it is very difficult to say when the equipment at the data centers will be back up and running,” Yandex said on Oct. 9.

The attacks also illustrate how digital infrastructure has become part of the wider Russia-Ukraine conflict. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has described the strikes as a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres.

Reuters has reported that Russian strikes have forced some Ukrainian facilities to suspend operations, with one outage temporarily leaving about 100,000 households without internet access.