Strikes hit three of Yandex’s five data centres in four days

Ukrainian drone attacks struck three of Yandex’s five data centres over four days, disrupting operations at facilities in Vladimir, Ryazan and Kaluga.¹ The most complete shutdown occurred in Vladimir, where a strike on Sunday stopped the facility’s operations entirely.¹ The attacks did not affect every site in the same way: Ryazan was disabled, while only part of the Kaluga operation went offline.¹ Before the Vladimir strike, two of the company’s five facilities had already been disabled by Ukrainian drone attacks.² That earlier count and the four-day tally describe different points in the sequence, with Vladimir included in the later report of three affected sites.¹²

The Vladimir installation is described as a 50-megawatt site roughly 180 kilometers northeast of Moscow, placing the shutdown at a substantial facility rather than a small local server room.¹⁴ Its interruption reached beyond the facility itself: ride-hailing, online banking and other digital services were disrupted across dozens of Russian municipalities.¹ The reported effects also crossed national borders, extending to Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia.¹ The reporting identifies service categories and the geographic reach, but does not give a count of affected customers or a duration for each interruption.¹ As a result, the scale of impact here is measured by the number of named service types and places, not by a reported total of users.¹

The sequence included separate reported incidents at three regional facilities: a strike disabled the Ryazan site on Thursday, and Ukrainian drones hit Kaluga on Friday.¹ At Kaluga, part of Yandex’s operations went offline, and the incident resulted in injuries to nine people.¹³ The Vladimir report describes structural damage and a complete operational stop, but says personnel were not injured there.¹ These descriptions distinguish operational consequences from human ones: a facility could stop working without reported staff injuries, while the Kaluga strike had injured people.¹³ The available accounts do not provide a comparable damage estimate for each of the three locations.¹³

The affected facilities matter to Yandex’s artificial-intelligence work as well as its broader digital operations.¹³⁴ The company’s Sasovo site contains two of its three supercomputers used to develop artificial intelligence, while its third system is at Vladimir.³⁴ Yandex’s third supercomputer at Vladimir is used for neural-network training and AI systems.⁴ The supplied reporting supports the broader conclusion that all three Yandex supercomputers used for artificial-intelligence and neural-network development are housed at sites hit and damaged by Ukrainian drone strikes.¹ That supported conclusion connects the facility attacks to the company’s computing infrastructure, but does not quantify how much computing capacity became unavailable.¹³⁴

Yandex said certain features of its artificial-intelligence chatbot had been temporarily switched off after the attacks.³ It also cautioned that equipment at Sasovo might have been damaged beyond repair after a fire began during an overnight attack.⁴ The Sasovo warning concerns hardware at the site that houses two of the company’s three AI-development supercomputers.³⁴ Separately, Yandex said it could not reliably forecast when the damaged infrastructure would regain full functionality.³ Together, the reports establish that some chatbot capabilities were disabled and that the timetable for full recovery remained uncertain, without specifying a restoration date.³

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy characterized the strikes on Russian data centres as a precise and proportionate answer to Russian attacks on Ukraine’s digital infrastructure.² Ukraine’s defence ministry said the attacks might force the Russian government to direct resources toward repairing damaged technical sites.³ Those statements present the strikes as both a response to earlier infrastructure attacks and a way to impose repair demands.²³ The latter is the ministry’s stated possibility, not a reported accounting of resources already moved or repair spending completed.³ The reporting therefore records an official rationale and an anticipated consequence, rather than evidence that the anticipated allocation has occurred.²³

The wider infrastructure context includes Russian military strikes on Ukrainian telecommunications networks operated by Kyivstar, Vodafone Ukraine and Omega Telecom.⁴ A Russian drone strike on a commercial centre in Kyiv the previous month killed four people and disrupted internet service for about 100,000 households.³ Another Russian bombing in Zaporizhzhia killed 20 people, among them four children, and wounded more than 30.¹ These reports describe harm to people and communications infrastructure in Ukraine, while the Yandex reports describe attacks on Russian data facilities and their services.¹³⁴ The figures are not directly comparable: one set counts deaths, injuries and households, while the Yandex accounts describe facilities, service interruptions and geographic reach.¹³

The reporting also records a Ukrainian drone attack in Russia’s Bryansk border region that killed one person and injured two.⁶ Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha affirmed that President Zelenskyy continued to have the confidence of Ukraine’s population.⁶ Neither statement supplies a direct measure of the Yandex outages, but both forms part of the wider reporting on the conflict surrounding the strikes.¹⁶ The available facts give no survey figures for the minister’s assertion and no further operational details about the Bryansk incident.⁶

Yandex’s corporate structure had also changed before these attacks: in 2024, its original Dutch holding company separated from the Russian business and adopted the name Nebius Group.⁴ That separation is relevant background to the company’s identity, but the reporting does not connect it to the facilities’ operations or the damage from the strikes.¹⁴ The infrastructure picture is more direct: three of five data centres were struck over four days, and the Vladimir shutdown disrupted services across multiple countries.¹ The company’s warnings about uncertain recovery and temporary chatbot limitations show that the effects extended beyond physical damage into service availability.³ The reporting establishes the scale and reach of the disruption, while leaving the duration of outages and the eventual condition of damaged equipment unresolved.¹³⁴