Drones Hit Russia'S Biggest Yandex Data Centre — the Whole Site Is Shut Down

Tens of thousands of servers, one fire, and Russia's answer to Google switched off its largest data centre.

Yandex said drones hit its facility in Sasovo in the Ryazan region, about 300 kilometres south-east of Moscow. The attack caused a fire and forced the company to stop the site entirely, it told Reuters, while it restores the affected services. Its main consumer services, it said, kept running.

“There are no casualties, and emergency services are on site dealing with the aftermath.”

— Yandex, statement to CNBC

A tit-for-tat in the server war

The strike follows a wave of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres in recent weeks. Until now there had been no confirmed major Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian data centre, Reuters notes. Ukraine has not claimed this one, CNBC reports, though Kyiv has stepped up strikes on Russian refineries and other infrastructure.

Yandex Cloud reported power problems in one of its availability zones from about 1:31 a.m. and advised customers to move workloads to other zones, according to the Kyiv Independent. The Ryazan governor once described the Sasovo complex as housing tens of thousands of servers.

Server farm, or tool factory?

There is a twist. The data centre sits on the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant, which makes precision machines used by Russia's defence industry and has been under British sanctions since 2024. The Kyiv Independent says it is unclear whether the servers, the factory or both were the target.

@visegrad24, whose post is the source of this Signal, wrote that Ukraine struck the centre and that it "burned down to the ground". The fire and the full shutdown are confirmed by Yandex, but no report so far confirms total destruction, and Ukraine has not said it carried out the attack.