Russian tech company Yandex said Thursday a drone strike set fire to a major data center, forcing a full shutdown as its shares fell more than 3%.
Key Points:
- Yandex fully suspended its Sasovo data center in Russia's Ryazan region on Thursday after a fire the company blamed on a drone attack.
- A second drone attack knocked out several modules at its Kaluga data center, the company told Yellow.com on Friday.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv is responding to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers.
Yandex Shutdown Details
Yandex told Yellow.com on Friday that a drone attack also hit its data center in Kaluga, the second strike on its facilities in two days, and that "several data center modules are completely out of service." The company said some services may be disrupted while it assesses "the full extent of the damage," and added that emergency services and its own specialists are on site and no one was injured.
The first strike came Thursday, when Yandex said drones hit its facility in Sasovo, a town in the Ryazan region, and started a fire that damaged part of the infrastructure. No one was hurt. The company fully suspended the site and said its core consumer services kept working, though outages reached the Yandex Disk and Yandex Documents services.
Yandex Cloud flagged power problems in one availability zone from about 1:31 a.m. local time Thursday and advised customers to move workloads elsewhere. Yandex shares dropped more than 3% on the Moscow Exchange that morning and fell about 4% on Friday after news of the second attack.
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Yandex Supercomputer Risk
The Sasovo center houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers, Lyapunov and Chervonenkis, which the company uses to train neural networks. Chervonenkis, its most powerful machine, ranked 19th on the Top500 list of the world's supercomputers in 2021, before sanctions made upgrades difficult and it slipped out of the top 100. Yandex cannot yet confirm whether the Sasovo equipment can be restored.
Kaluga, southwest of Moscow, is the newest of Yandex's five large data centers and was designed as its largest, with a planned capacity of 63 megawatts and room for more than 3,800 server racks. Internet monitoring group NetBlocks recorded a significant disruption to Yandex's network after the Sasovo strike, with connectivity falling to about 70% of normal levels.
Zelenskyy Strike Response
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv on Thursday that Russia has been hitting Ukrainian data centers and continues to do so. Ukraine is responding, he said, without sharing details. Before Thursday, no major Russian data center had been knocked offline during the war.
Russia began striking Ukrainian data centers in September, and attacks since Sept. 23 have damaged or destroyed sites belonging to at least eight companies, some of them hit more than once. Moscow's Defense Ministry claimed those facilities processed intelligence data for Ukraine's armed forces.
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