Drones knock three Yandex data centres offline in four days

The message went out on Yandex’s Telegram channel on Sunday, October 11, and it read nothing like the usual output of a tech company. “Operations at the data centre have been completely suspended,” it said of the company’s site in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow, after a drone attack. “The remaining resource configuration is considered unstable.” Customers were advised to activate their disaster-recovery plans.

No one was hurt, Yandex said, without saying how many services had gone down or who was behind the attack. According to Ukrainska Pravda, the regional governor, Alexander Avdeyev, confirmed that a drone had caused a fire at an “infrastructure facility” near Vladimir and that residents of nearby buildings had been evacuated. Yandex Music, the Telemost video-calling service and the Yandex Home smart-home platform were among the services disrupted.

Sasovo, Kaluga, Vladimir

It was the third site hit in four days. The first, on Thursday, October 8, was Sasovo, in the Ryazan region southeast of Moscow. A drone started a fire there and the facility “has stopped operating entirely,” a Yandex spokesperson told AFP. The site, opened in 2014 on part of the former Sasta machine-tool plant, houses tens of thousands of servers and, according to Reuters, two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI models. The company said it could not yet confirm whether the equipment could be restored. Its shares fell more than 3.4% in morning trading on the Moscow Exchange, Newsweek reported.

The next day, Friday, October 9, Yandex said Ukrainian drones had struck its data centre in the Kaluga region, southwest of the capital, putting several modules out of action. Governor Vladislav Shapsha reported nine people injured and houses damaged in two districts, with no established link to the data centre, where no one was hurt.

Kyiv has claimed none of the strikes, which is not unusual: Ukraine rarely confirms its operations on Russian soil quickly. Asked on Thursday about Sasovo, Volodymyr Zelensky said, in Al Jazeera’s translation: “We always respond in mirror-like fashion.” The Ukrainian president pointed out that Russia had been targeting Ukrainian data centres. In late September, Russian strikes hit internet providers and data centres in Kyiv, cutting off about 100,000 households, according to Ukrainian officials. Russia’s defence ministry said those sites processed intelligence for the Ukrainian military.

Redundancy under fire

For cloud architects, the sequence is unsettling. The whole doctrine of resilience rests on spreading things out: several sites, tens or hundreds of kilometres apart, so that a fire, a power cut or a flood takes out only one. It was not designed for an adversary able to go after every site of the same operator, one by one. When three facilities fall in four days, the backup copy may be sitting in the hall that burns the next day.

The episode also turns the sovereignty argument on its head. Keeping data at home, with a domestic provider, protects against foreign laws and sanctions. It does not protect against an adversary who can reach every building in the country. A copy hosted abroad, with another operator, starts to look less like a weakness and more like insurance, provided you accept the legal cost.

The lesson reaches well beyond the two countries. A data centre is a building visible on a satellite image, fed by substations and cooled by equipment that is hard to hide. Debates over “sovereign clouds”, from Dakar to Nairobi, have mostly been about laws and where data sits. The days of Sasovo and Vladimir add a line to the specification: the distance between sites, and what happens when all of them are hit.