MOSCOW — A Yandex data centre in Russia’s Vladimir region was completely shut down after a drone attack damaged its infrastructure Sunday, the technology company said.

No one was injured. Yandex said some services were unavailable and specialist teams were assessing the damage. The company did not identify who launched the attack, and responsibility had not been independently established when this article was published.

Cloud platform enters emergency mode

Yandex Cloud’s public status page said the affected availability zone was operating in emergency mode and described the remaining resource configuration as unstable. Customers were advised to activate disaster-recovery plans at other sites.

In a later update, Yandex said its cloud console and API were available and that compute resources remained accessible in two other zones. It warned that some databases could be read-only or unavailable, object storage could have writing problems, and some Kubernetes clusters and other services could remain disrupted.

Third major data centre affected in days

Reuters reported that the Vladimir facility was the third major Yandex data centre taken out of action in several days.

A drone attack on the company’s Sasovo hub during the night of October 7–8 caused a fire and forced a full shutdown. Yandex has said the site contained tens of thousands of servers and housed two of the three supercomputers used to develop its artificial-intelligence model. The company had not confirmed whether those systems were damaged.

Another attack on October 9 partly disabled Yandex infrastructure in the Kaluga region. Yandex said no employees were injured in those earlier incidents and that teams were working to restore services.

Digital infrastructure becomes a war target

Yandex operates Russia’s largest internet search engine as well as cloud, mapping, transport, entertainment and commercial services used by individuals and businesses. The outages underline the expanding risk to civilian digital infrastructure as attacks in the Russia–Ukraine war spread beyond energy, transport and industrial facilities.

Sources: Reuters, October 11; Yandex Cloud service status, October 11; Yandex statement on the earlier Sasovo and Kaluga attacks, October 9.

Lead image: generic data-centre server racks photographed by Carl Lender, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0; not a photograph of the affected Yandex facility.