Yandex halted its Sasovo data center after an October 8 drone attack, disrupting cloud services.
Why it matters: The outage affected Yandex Cloud resources and disrupted specified online services used by Russian companies and consumers. The incidents show how physical attacks can interrupt cloud services and other digital infrastructure.
- A drone attack on October 8 caused a fire and seriously damaged Yandex's Sasovo data center in Russia's Ryazan region.
- The affected Yandex Cloud zone, ru-central1-b, included computing, storage, databases and Kubernetes, a service for managing containers.
- Yandex said Sasovo housed two of its three supercomputers used to develop YandexGPT; available reports do not establish whether the machines were damaged.
- A second drone attack on October 9 damaged Yandex's data center in Kaluga and disabled several modules.
A drone attack caused a fire and seriously damaged Yandex's data center in Sasovo, in Russia's Ryazan region, during the night of October 7-8, according to Yandex. The company said operations at the facility were completely halted, some services could become unavailable and no employees were injured.
The incident affected Yandex Cloud's ru-central1-b, an availability zone, or distinct location within the cloud system. The zone included computing resources, storage, databases and Kubernetes, a service for managing software containers, according to the service-status notice. Russian users and companies reported disruptions involving media websites, Cian, electronic-document services and some financial-app functions, RBC reported. Those examples do not represent a complete account of the customer impact.
Yandex operates five data centers. The company said the Sasovo facility housed two of its three supercomputers used to develop YandexGPT, according to its update. The available reports do not establish whether those machines were damaged or destroyed.
On October 9, a second drone attack damaged Yandex's data center in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow, with several modules completely disabled, according to Reuters. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the strike and described it as a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data infrastructure.
Yandex said it was working to restore services and had arranged for other cloud providers to help customers move data and services, according to its update. The company has not disclosed the full damage, losses, restoration timetable or whether any data was permanently lost. The available reports do not establish cyberattacks, data theft or permanent data loss.
By the numbers
- 5 - Yandex data centers
- 2 of 3 - Yandex supercomputers used to develop YandexGPT that the company said were housed at Sasovo
- 2 - Yandex data centers damaged in drone attacks on October 8 and October 9
Yes, but: The available reports do not establish whether the Sasovo supercomputers were damaged, whether data was permanently lost or when all services will be restored.
What's next: Yandex said it was working to restore services and helping customers move data and services to other cloud providers.