A drone attack has damaged the infrastructure of Yandex's data center located in the Vladimir region of Russia. The company confirmed that operations at the facility have been completely halted and it has entered emergency mode.

This attack marks the third strike against Yandex data centers in the past week. Previously, the Sasovo data center was attacked, resulting in a fire and complete shutdown. This site housed tens of thousands of servers and deployed two supercomputers, Lyapunov and Chervonenkis (based on Nvidia A100 chips), for training YandexGPT. The Kaluga data center also suffered partial destruction of some modules; it covers an area of 130,000 square meters and has an annual electricity consumption equivalent to that of 220,000 UK households.

The Vladimir data center has a designed capacity of approximately 50 megawatts and can accommodate 2,880 server racks. Following the attack, Yandex Cloud reported a power outage in the ru-central1-a availability zone, causing over 80 critical services to go offline, including computing, networking, storage, databases, and the YandexGPT API. Users are unable to access Yandex Go for ride-hailing, Yandex Pro, smart home services, disk and document services. Third-party dependencies, including Russian Railways, MegaFon, T-Bank, Cian, Avito, IVI, and several media and applications, have also experienced interruptions.

Yandex stated that no injuries were reported, and emergency teams have been deployed to assess recovery plans. However, the allocation of remaining resources is unstable, and technical support communications may be disrupted. The company had previously warned that data centers are critical to services, and recovery times are extremely difficult to predict. Following the attack, Yandex's stock price on the Moscow Exchange has dropped approximately 3% to 4%, and the company had previously removed some data centers from its own mapping services.

These attacks are seen as a response to ongoing assaults on Ukrainian data centers by Russian forces since the end of September. Ukrainian arms manufacturer Firepoint claimed to have used FP-1 one-way attack drones in the Kaluga strike. Yandex's core consumer services had initially claimed to be unaffected, but the chain disruptions have spread to multiple sectors, including transportation, e-commerce, banking, and streaming, with monitoring platforms recording tens of thousands of user complaints in a single day.

The market has reacted to the incident by selling off Yandex shares, with capital flowing out of Russian tech and cloud infrastructure or seeking safe havens. Enterprises and government services relying on Yandex Cloud are under pressure, seeking alternatives or activating disaster recovery, while physical infrastructure suppliers and redundancy deployers may benefit in the short term. The pricing power for AI training and cloud services may temporarily shift due to decreased availability.

Source: Public Information