Russian tech company Yandex shut its Vladimir data center Sunday, its third facility hit by drones in four days and the second named as a home of its AI supercomputers.
Key Points:
- Yandex fully suspended its Vladimir data center after a drone attack and reported no injuries.
- The site is the third Yandex facility hit since Oct. 8, after strikes in Sasovo and Kaluga.
- Yandex said in 2021 that its three AI supercomputers ran in Sasovo and Vladimir.
Yandex Vladimir Shutdown
The company said the attack damaged its infrastructure and forced a complete halt at the site east of Moscow. No one was injured, it added, though some services remain unavailable. Vladimir Gov. Alexander Avdeyev confirmed a fire and said the strike temporarily cut electricity to about 5,000 residents.
Yandex Cloud warned customers that the platform was running in emergency mode, called the remaining setup "unstable" and urged them to activate disaster-recovery plans. Users of the Yandex Go taxi app reported failed orders across Russia and in Serbia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, while Russian media described outages at music and smart home services.
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Yandex AI Supercomputers
Yandex wrote in 2021 that two of its three supercomputers, Chervonenkis and Lyapunov, ran in Sasovo, while the third, Galushkin, sat in Vladimir. The company uses the machines to train its YandexGPT model, and it declined to say whether the Sasovo strike damaged the two there. Sberbank, its main domestic rival, has said Russian AI developers trail U.S. and Chinese peers by six to nine months, with trouble importing advanced chips under sanctions seen as the main bottleneck.
Yandex has said it cannot confirm whether the Sasovo equipment can be restored.
On Oct. 10, the company updated its user agreement to list drone and missile attacks as force majeure, a clause that can release it from contractual obligations. Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the state power in August to take control of critical infrastructure deemed poorly protected from drones. Yandex shares fell about 4% on the Moscow Exchange after the Kaluga strike.
Zelenskyy Data Center Response
Ukraine has not commented on the Vladimir attack. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Oct. 8 that Kyiv responds in kind to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers, adding that he could not share all the details.
The run of attacks began Oct. 8, when drones set fire to the Sasovo site and halted it, the first major strike on a Russian data hub since the war began. A day later, drones disabled several modules at the Kaluga data center southwest of Moscow. Russia had struck several Ukrainian data centers and telecom facilities over the previous month, and one attack cut internet access for roughly 100,000 households.
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