Yandex Data Centre Shut Down in Third Drone Strike This Week — SkimNews
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- Yandex shut down its data centre in Vladimir, east of Moscow, after a drone attack on Sunday, with no injuries reported but several of the company's services disrupted.
- Yandex warned users that the remaining resource configuration is "unstable" and advised them to activate disaster-recovery plans while it operated in emergency mode.
- The Vladimir strike is the third hit on Yandex data centres in a week: a facility in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow was struck Friday, and the Sasovo hub southeast of Moscow was knocked offline Thursday.
- The Sasovo data hub houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI model, dealing a direct hit to the company's AI infrastructure.
- Zelenskyy said on Thursday: "We always respond in mirror-like fashion," confirming Ukraine's strikes on Yandex facilities are deliberate retaliation for Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres.
- Russia has struck several Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications facilities over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv, in an effort to disrupt the country's connectivity and digital commerce.
Why it matters: Three Yandex facilities hit in seven days — two of them housing supercomputers powering Russia's AI development — is a material blow to the country's flagship tech company's compute capacity, and Zelenskyy has openly framed the campaign as deliberate mirror retaliation. With Russia simultaneously targeting Ukrainian data centres and telecoms in central Kyiv, both sides have now signalled that civilian-adjacent digital infrastructure is fair game.
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