Ukrainian drones hit two Yandex data centres in Russia, leaving the company struggling to keep services running
Russian tech company Yandex says Ukrainian drones struck two of its five data centres within two days, and it is struggling to maintain services. President Volodymyr Zelensky described the attacks as a response to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres.
Yandex, the Russian technology company often called "Russia's Google", says it is struggling to maintain services after Ukrainian drones hit two of its five data centres over the past two days. Yandex runs Russia's most popular search engine, plus a food-ordering and taxi app used by tens of millions of people. The attacks come as both sides have stepped up strikes on infrastructure in recent months, in the war that began with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
What happened
Yandex said its data centre in Sasovo, in Russia's Ryazan region, was "seriously damaged" in a drone attack overnight into Thursday, and its operations were completely suspended. A second centre, in Kaluga, a region south-west of Moscow, was hit on Friday morning, with part of its infrastructure taken out of service. The company said these sites are "critical" to its services and that it is "very difficult to predict" when they will be back online. Teams are working "day and night". No Yandex employees were hurt, but the governor of the Kaluga region said nine people were injured in a drone attack on the city's infrastructure.
The full extent of the disruption is unclear. Yandex told the state news agency Tass that some functions of its AI chatbot were temporarily unavailable and that smart home devices might also experience problems.
Why the sites matter
Yandex has previously said the Kaluga centre is one of Russia's largest, covering 130,000 square metres and using as much electricity each year as 220,000 UK households. The Sasovo site houses two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company's AI model; it is not known whether they survived.
Positions of the two sides
Ukraine's defence ministry confirmed the attacks, saying they could force Russia to divert resources to repairing the damaged capacity. Zelensky said Kyiv was responding in a "mirror-like fashion" to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres. Last month, a Russian drone hit a business centre in Kyiv, killing four people and damaging a data centre; about 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding region lost internet access. Some Ukrainian firms have started moving data from damaged servers to facilities abroad. Moscow says the data centres were used by Ukrainian military intelligence, while Ukraine accuses Russia of deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure.
