Russian tech company Yandex said Thursday a drone strike set fire to its largest 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 after a fire the company blamed on a drone attack.
- The site holds two of the company's three supercomputers, and their condition remains unknown.
- Ukraine has not commented on the strike, which follows weeks of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers.
Yandex Shutdown Details
Yandex said drones hit the facility in Sasovo, a town in the Ryazan region, and started a fire that damaged part of its infrastructure. No one was hurt. The company fully suspended the site, said its core consumer services kept working and reported that it was restoring the affected ones.
Yandex Cloud flagged power problems in one availability zone from about 1:31 a.m. local time and advised customers to move workloads elsewhere. The company later said it had shifted work to its other facilities, which were running normally, though customers could still face limits on creating new cloud resources.
Yandex shares dropped more than 3% in morning trading on the Moscow Exchange. Ryazan Gov. Pavel Malkov did not name the company, saying only that a roof caught fire at a business in the Sasovo district. He described the complex in 2022 as housing tens of thousands of servers.
Also Read: How Much Does Anthropic's CEO Make? IPO Filing Has The Answer
Supercomputer Risk
The Sasovo center houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers, Lyapunov and Chervonenkis, which the company uses to train neural networks, while the third sits in Vladimir. Chervonenkis, the company's 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 has not yet reported on either machine's condition. Internet monitoring group NetBlocks recorded a significant disruption to Yandex's network, with connectivity falling to about 70% of normal levels, and outages reached the Yandex Disk and Yandex Documents services. The intended target also remains unclear, because the data center has sat since 2014 on the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant, which Britain sanctioned in 2024 over its defense-sector role.
Ukraine Data Centers
Yandex operates five large data centers in Russia, and the fire marks the first time the war has knocked a major Russian one offline.
Ukraine has not commented, while Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses intercepted 399 Ukrainian drones overnight across 18 regions and annexed Crimea.
Russia began striking Ukrainian data centers in September, and attacks since Sept. 23 have damaged or destroyed sites belonging to at least eight companies. One strike that day cut fixed-line internet to about 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding region, Ukrainian officials said. Moscow's Defense Ministry claimed those facilities processed intelligence data for Ukraine's armed forces.
Read Next: OpenAI's 722 AI Math Papers Are Public, Now Mathematicians Must Judge Them
