Ukrainian drones struck two of Yandex's five data centres in western Russia over Thursday and Friday, forcing the Russian tech giant to suspend operations at one facility completely and take infrastructure offline at another.
Yandex, Russia's most-used search engine and operator of widely-used food-ordering and taxi applications serving tens of millions, said it was "very difficult to predict" when services would return to normal. The company's teams were working around the clock to maintain operations, but acknowledged the task was not simple. Some AI chatbot functions became temporarily unavailable, and smart home devices may experience disruptions.
The Sasovo data centre in Ryazan region sustained serious damage in Thursday night's strike. Yandex said the facility was critical to its operations and housed two of three supercomputers used to develop the company's AI model. The status of those supercomputers remained unclear. A second strike hit the Kaluga data centre, southwest of Moscow, on Friday morning. Yandex previously described Kaluga as one of Russia's largest data centres, covering 130,000 square metres and consuming electricity equivalent to that used by 220,000 UK households annually.
Ukraine's defence ministry confirmed responsibility for the attacks, stating they would "force Russia to divert resources to repair the damaged capacity." President Volodymyr Zelensky characterized the strikes as a "mirror-like" response to weeks of Russian drone attacks on Ukrainian data centres. In a strike last month, a Russian drone hit a business centre in Kyiv, killing four people and damaging a data centre, which left about 100,000 households without internet.
Ukraine accuses Russia of deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure, while Moscow claims the data centres support Ukrainian military intelligence. Both sides have escalated infrastructure attacks as the conflict continues. Kyiv says strikes aim at revenue sources funding Russia's war effort. Russia has intensified strikes on energy facilities ahead of winter, following the pattern established since the full-scale invasion began in 2022. Some Ukrainian firms have begun relocating data from damaged servers to facilities abroad.
No Yandex employees were injured in the strikes, though the regional governor in Kaluga reported nine people injured in drone attacks on the city's infrastructure.