Drone Strikes Damage Yandex Data Centers and Disrupt Russian Digital Services

Reported Ukrainian drone strikes damaged multiple Yandex data centers in Russia, exposing the physical vulnerability of infrastructure supporting cloud and consumer services. Yandex said several modules at its 63-megawatt Kaluga facility were completely taken out of operation following an October 9 attack, according to Russian state media cited by Tom’s Hardware. That incident followed a strike at Sasovo that disrupted Yandex Cloud; a subsequent report said operations at Yandex’s Vladimir facility, which houses the Galushkin supercomputer, were suspended after an October 11 strike. Reported downstream disruptions affected banking, payments, communications, commerce, transportation, and navigation, although the full user impact remains unclear and whether Kaluga was the intended target is unconfirmed.

The incidents were physical attacks, not reported cyber intrusions, and underscore the importance of geographically separated recovery capacity and cloud-provider continuity planning. Russian commentators identified Yandex’s concentrated infrastructure as a wartime vulnerability and cited Russia’s Sovereign Internet Law as an obstacle to overseas backups. Separately, a Reddit post linked the strikes to a near-zero bot-traffic percentage in a Cloudflare Radar view of Yandex’s AS13238 network. That observation does not establish a collapse in Russia-wide bot traffic, a comparable reduction in traffic volume, malicious bot activity, or causation by the strikes; commenters disputed the broader claim.