Ukrainian drones hit Yandex data centres, disrupting Russian apps

Ukrainian drone strikes over the past week hit some of Yandex's biggest data centres, disrupting services including shopping and taxi apps in major Russian cities, Tom's Hardware reported.

Why it matters: Yandex runs search, maps, shopping, cloud and ride hailing services with few domestic alternatives, so damage to a small number of large centres can spread disruption widely across Russian digital services.

Data as of Friday, October 16, 2026, 06:42 ET. Single sourced to a Tom's Hardware news analysis opened and read in full in the live browser, which cites its own earlier reports and Cloudflare data. The strike claims are not independently corroborated in this run, hence grade C.

Ukrainian drones struck some of Yandex’s biggest data centres over the past week, and strikes on just three facilities disrupted key services in major Russian cities, including shopping and taxi apps, Tom’s Hardware reported. Yandex operates only a handful of major centres, while other providers supporting its cloud are mostly small, at a few megawatts each.

The analysis contrasted that concentration with Ukraine, where much infrastructure runs on distributed Western cloud hosting that can migrate abroad. It also qualified early claims about bot traffic, noting Cloudflare data showing bots largely migrated to other hosts rather than disappearing.

Ukrainian drones hit Yandex data centres, disrupting Russian apps

Sources