Latest (Friday, October 9): Yandex said Friday that several modules at its data centre in Russia’s Kaluga region had been completely disabled by a drone attack, the second strike on a Yandex facility in two days. Two of the company’s five data centres have now been hit, and an analyst at T-Investments warned that while Yandex can redistribute some load to its remaining centres, “if the chain of attacks continues, this possibility vanishes.”
The scale of what is at stake is becoming clearer. Reuters reported Thursday that Yandex cannot yet determine whether equipment at the Sasovo data centre can be restored at all: “For the moment, we cannot confirm whether it is possible to restore the data centre equipment in Sasovo.” The Sasovo hub hosts tens of thousands of servers and, per Yandex’s own 2021 disclosure, two of the company’s three supercomputers, built around Nvidia A100 chips and used to train its YandexGPT large language model. Yandex has declined to say whether the supercomputers were damaged. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking in Kyiv, said Ukraine was “mirroring” Russian attacks on data centres: “We always respond in mirror-like fashion. You all know, they have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres.”
Yandex said a drone attack on its data centre in Sasovo, about 300 kilometres southeast of Moscow, caused a fire that halted operations and took part of its Yandex Cloud infrastructure offline, with its ru-central1-b availability zone now down. The company advised customers to pursue unspecified alternative service restoration plans but warned service may not be restorable in the near term; Reuters reports Yandex is uncertain it can recover the facility at all. If written off, it would be the second cloud facility lost to a drone attack this year after AWS concluded its Bahrain site could not be recovered following an Iranian strike. Yandex has not commented on the source of the drone, though Ukrainian press reports Zelensky has said Russia struck Ukrainian data centres first and his government responds in kind, a claim that remains that side’s uncorroborated narrative.