Ukraine strikes third Yandex data center in Vladimir, disrupting services across Russia

Ukrainian drones struck a Yandex data center in Vladimir overnight Sunday, forcing the facility to shut down completely. This attack marks the third strike against the tech giant’s infrastructure in Russia within a single week, compounding ongoing disruptions to digital services.

The facility in Vladimir houses Galushkin, one of Yandex’s most powerful supercomputers. Yandex stated the site is operating in emergency mode with unstable remaining infrastructure. No details were released regarding whether the supercomputer itself sustained damage during the drone strike.

Attack Timeline and Infrastructure

The attacks began on October 7-8 when drones hit a Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region. That facility, opened in 2014, caught fire and was shut down. It reportedly hosted two of three supercomputers used for training artificial intelligence models.

A second strike occurred on October 9 at a data center in the Kaluga region. Yandex reported that part of the infrastructure was damaged but no employees were injured. Emergency responders were deployed to the site to manage the aftermath.

The three targeted facilities in Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir have a combined capacity of approximately 115 megawatts. These strikes have targeted three of Yandex’s six total data centers located within Russia, significantly reducing the company’s available computational resources.

Service Disruptions and Impact

Yandex Cloud provides computing infrastructure to thousands of businesses, and its outage has rippled outward. According to the Russian internet watchdog, users faced issues accessing email, booking taxis, and ordering food. Payments processed through Yandex Pay also experienced interruptions.

Consumer products including the Alice voice assistant and connected smart home devices stopped working in some households. More than a dozen third-party services hosted on Yandex infrastructure were affected, including retailers, internet providers, and fitness businesses.

The Russian segment of TikTok was also reportedly among the services impacted by the infrastructure failures. The full extent of the disruptions remains unclear as systems attempt to stabilize. Yandex has not confirmed if any specific software versions or CVEs are involved in the failures.

What should you do?

Security professionals should monitor service status pages for critical dependencies hosted on Yandex Cloud. Organizations relying on these services should verify backup connectivity options and ensure local data availability.

What to do and how to stay safe: Yandex

• Review current service level agreements with providers hosted on Yandex infrastructure to understand redundancy plans.
• Verify that critical business applications have failover mechanisms that do not rely solely on Yandex servers.
• Monitor official status dashboards for real-time updates on service restoration and infrastructure stability.
• Ensure local backups of essential data are current in case cloud access remains intermittent for an extended period.

Step-by-step guide: Cloud Misconfiguration Response: Containment, Recovery and Prevention Steps

General security guidance from the Threat Times newsroom. It is not confirmed advice from the organisations named in this story.

Frequently asked questions

How many Yandex data centers have been attacked recently?

Three of Yandex’s six data centers in Russia were targeted by Ukrainian drones in the past week.

Which services were disrupted by the attacks?

Disruptions affected Yandex Cloud, payments, taxi booking, food delivery, email, and third-party services including TikTok Russia.

Was any hardware damaged in the Vladimir attack?

Yandex confirmed the Vladimir facility shut down and infrastructure is unstable, but did not disclose if supercomputers were damaged.