Ukraine drone strikes hit two Yandex data centers in Russia

The first reported strike hit a Yandex data center in Russia's Ryazan region. The facility caught fire and was taken offline after what the company described as a Ukrainian drone attack, according to Euronews.

The target was more than an office building. Tom's Hardware identified the site as a major data center in Sasovo and reported that the targeted Yandex facilities housed two leading supercomputers. Its coverage also reported outages affecting services using Yandex Cloud.

On October 8, CNBC Technology reported that Yandex had paused operations at one of its data centers following the drone attack. The fire and shutdown brought the strikes directly into the company's computing infrastructure.

The same day, World News CNA reported that Yandex said it was unclear whether the affected data center could be restored. That left the recovery outlook uncertain, rather than simply a question of when operations would resume.

By October 9, The Register reported that Yandex said one of its cloud availability zones was unavailable because of a drone attack. That describes a disruption to part of its cloud infrastructure, not a confirmed shutdown of all Yandex services.

A second data center was then hit overnight from Thursday into Friday, October 9. Le Monde reported damage at a Yandex facility in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow, describing it as the second attack on the company's data centers in 48 hours.

The Financial Times described the strikes as retaliation for attacks on Ukraine's digital infrastructure. Al Jazeera placed them alongside continuing Ukrainian attacks on Russian missile plants and oil refineries.

Yandex has reported a second data center strike, according to World News CNA. The coverage establishes a shutdown at the first facility and damage at the second, but does not provide a confirmed timetable for restoring operations or a full account of equipment losses.

There were also reported casualties in the wider Kaluga attacks. Franceinfo reported that regional governor Vladislav Chapcha said strikes on infrastructure in Kaluga and its surrounding region injured nine people. The supplied coverage does not establish that those injuries occurred at the Yandex facility.

The immediate questions are whether the first center can be restored and how much capacity remains available after the second strike. Yandex's uncertainty about restoration, reported by World News CNA, leaves the scale and duration of the disruption unresolved.

A fuller damage assessment would also clarify whether the supercomputers identified in Tom's Hardware were damaged. Their presence at the targeted facilities does not, by itself, establish their destruction.