New to this? Read it in simple words
- Drones hit three Yandex data centres between October 8 and October 11.
- The Vladimir site stopped working on Sunday, and some services went down.
- Reuters says the first site held supercomputers used to train YandexGPT.
- Yandex told cloud customers to consider other sites for their systems.
- Data centre
- A building full of computers that run websites, apps and AI models.
- Supercomputer
- A very large group of computers working together, used here to train AI models.
- UAV
- An unmanned aerial vehicle: a drone.
Yandex is Russia’s largest internet company. It runs search, ride-hailing and payment apps, a cloud platform for other companies, and its own AI model, YandexGPT. In four days, drones hit three of its data centres.
The third site, in Vladimir
“As a result of a UAV attack, infrastructure at the Yandex data centre in Vladimir was damaged,” Yandex said in a service alert quoted by AFP. Work at the site, east of Moscow, was completely suspended, and Yandex said no one was hurt.
Yandex Cloud’s status page marks its zones as unavailable from 04:00 Moscow time on October 11. It lists 84 cloud services under the incident.
On Sunday evening, Yandex Cloud said the platform was still working in a limited mode. It advised customers to consider other sites for their systems and backups, and it had stopped handing out extra cloud capacity. Users reported problems with ride-hailing and payment apps, AFP said.
The sites in the order they were hit, from Yandex’s statements as Reuters, AFP and the Kyiv Independent reported them.
Three sites in four days
The first strike, on October 8, hit Yandex’s data centre in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region. A fire broke out, and Yandex said operations there were completely halted.
Reuters reported that, according to a 2021 Yandex statement, Sasovo held two of the three supercomputers Yandex used to train YandexGPT. Yandex declined to say whether they were damaged.
On October 9, drones hit Yandex’s site in the Kaluga region and completely disabled several modules there. Yandex said no one was hurt at the site. The Kaluga governor said nine people were hurt across the region that night.
Who is behind the strikes
Reuters called the Sasovo strike the first major Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian data hub. On October 8, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine was answering Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres.
“We are responding. I can’t share all the details,” Zelensky said. No one has claimed the Vladimir strike, and the reports do not say who carried it out.
Sources
Every fact in this story comes from the sources below. Open them to check our work.
- 1
- 2Research · October 11, 2026Russia’s Yandex Says Data Center in Vladimir Shut Down After Drone Attack Reuters via The Moscow Times
- 3
- 4Research · October 11, 2026Third Yandex data center in Russia shut down following reported drone attack The Kyiv Independent
- 5Research · October 8, 2026Drones hit Yandex data centre in first major attack on Russian data hub Reuters via The Star
- 6
- 7Research · October 9, 2026Ukraine strikes second data center of Russia’s “Google” in two days Newsweek
The damage and “no one was hurt” are Yandex’s own statements. The supercomputer detail comes from Reuters alone, and nobody has claimed the Vladimir strike.
Drones knocked out a third Yandex data centre in four days, leaving its cloud in limited mode and customers told to move. How we rate the mood