Drones attacked Yandex's third data center in Russia, causing more than 80 Yandex Cloud services to go down

On the night of October 10, drones attacked the Yandex data center in Russia’s Vladimir Oblast. The company confirmed that operations had come to a complete halt, causing widespread disruptions to dozens of digital services across the country.

Local residents began reporting explosions in the Vladimir region during the night. According to them, the company’s data center in the city of Vladimir was struck.

The facility has a capacity of 50 MW and is designed to accommodate 2,880 server racks. At the time of the initial reports, Russian authorities had not officially commented on the attack.

Initially, users encountered disruptions in popular services, including:

• the “Alisa” voice assistant;
• the “Yandex Music” music service;
• the “Telemist” video conferencing platform;
• the “Yandex Home” smart home service.

However, the problems turned out to be much more widespread. In areas covered by the Yandex Cloud platform, more than 80 key services stopped working. The outages affected computing and networking resources, databases, storage, tools for developers and businesses, as well as artificial intelligence services, including the YandexGPT API.

Yandex confirmed that the data center in Vladimir had been completely shut down due to the drone attack. According to the company, there were no casualties.

Prior to this, Yandex Cloud had reported power outages in one of the platform’s availability zones.

Alexander Avdeev, governor of the Vladimir Region, confirmed a drone attack on infrastructure in the suburbs of Vladimir.

He said a fire broke out after the strike. Due to the shutdown of two substations, about 5,000 residents were left without power. Power is expected to be restored via a backup system once the threat has been eliminated.

Residents of buildings located closest to the targeted facility are being evacuated. Avdeev stated that residential buildings were not destroyed, and there are currently no reports of casualties.

This was reported by the OSINT channel Exilenova+ and monitoring channels.

Prior to this, Ukrainian drones struck two of the five data centers belonging to the Russian technology company Yandex in the Sasovo area and the Kaluga region of the Russian Federation—the aggressor state. One of the facilities housed two of the three supercomputers that Yandex uses to train its YandexGPT artificial intelligence model.

The Russian company Yandex has not yet been able to specify a timeline for restoring operations at the two data centers damaged by drone attacks on October 8 and 9. The facility in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, has completely ceased operations, while part of the infrastructure at the data center in Kaluga has been rendered inoperable.