Ukraine strikes major data center of Russia’s “Google” in drone attack

Operations at a data center owned by the Russian technology company Yandex have been suspended following a Ukrainian drone attack on Thursday.

Yandex—Russia’s leading technology company whose search engine is considered the country’s answer to Google—said a fire broke out after a strike on one of its data centers in the city of Ryazan, located around 120 miles south-east of Moscow.

Thursday’s attack was the first by Ukraine on a Russian data center, Reuters reported. It follows strikes by Moscow on Ukrainian data centers in recent weeks.

Operations at the center have been completely halted, and some services are unavailable to users, the company told the Russian state news agency TASS.

Ukraine does not usually immediately confirm strikes on Russian territory, and has not confirmed the latest attack.

Yandex also runs YandexGPT, one of Russia’s leading generative ‌AI models.

This is a developing story. More to follow.