Drones struck a major data center in Russia’s Ryazan region owned by Yandex overnight, the company said on Thursday, causing a fire that forced the company to fully suspend the center’s operations while it dealt with the consequences and worked to restore affected services. Yandex said its core consumer services were not affected.
The site is Yandex DC Sasovo, identified by OSINT specialists as Yandex’s largest data center facility. Yandex Cloud acknowledged power problems at its “ru-central-b” availability zone, with disruptions beginning at 1:31am local time. The data center sits on the Sasta production complex, which includes machinery and assembly workshops, R&D facilities and a foundry, and serves the Russian defense industry; Sasta was placed under UK sanctions in 2024, and it is unclear whether the attackers aimed at the server halls, the factory workshops, or both.
The strike follows a wave of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers in recent weeks. Facilities operated by Parkovyi Data Center, MiroHost, Datagroup, Vodafone Ukraine, De Novo, Cosmonova, Omega Telecom and Ukrtelecom have all taken damage from drones, but this is the first confirmed major Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian data center. Yandex operates five large data centers in Russia, in Vladimir, Sasovo, Ivanteevka, Mytishchi and Kaluga Oblast. Yandex, once held through a Netherlands-based company, fully separated its Russian and European operations in February 2024; the European company is now known as Nebius.