Ukraine Strikes Yandex Data Centre in Russia

Yandex Ukraine struck and partially disabled a major data centre operated by Russian technology company Yandex in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow on Friday, expanding its campaign against Russian infrastructure after a similar facility was attacked a day earlier. Yandex confirmed that Ukrainian drones had struck the facility and partially put it out of action. Ukrainian arms manufacturer Firepoint said Kyiv had used its FP-1 one-way attack drones against what it described as Yandex's largest data centre, adding that several modules had been completely disabled. The latest attack followed a strike on Yandex's data centre in Sasovo, in Russia's Ryazan region. The facility houses two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company's artificial intelligence model. Yandex said it was assessing the damage and could not confirm whether the affected equipment could be restored. The attacks mark an expansion of the infrastructure targeted in the war between Russia and Ukraine, which has continued for more than four years. Both sides have increasingly used drones against energy facilities, oil refineries, ports, vessels carrying oil and grain, e-commerce warehouses and data centres. Yandex, often described as Russia's Google, plays a major role in the country's technology sector and artificial intelligence development. Its applications are widely used for navigation, music, films, grocery deliveries and other everyday services. The company warned that the attacks had struck at the core of its operations. It said it was working to maintain services and had reached an agreement with other cloud providers to help Yandex Cloud customers transfer their data and services. The full extent of the disruption remained unclear, although at least one Yandex application displayed warnings about possible operational problems. The company said its teams were working around the clock to restore affected services.

"Data centers are the iron heart of Yandex. Their operation is critical for services that have become part of people’s everyday lives." - Yandex (Russian technology company) "Right now this is our most important task, but unfortunately it is not an easy one." - Yandex (Russian technology company, on restoring disrupted services) "The risks involve not only the potential temporary unavailability of Yandex services and lost revenue in specific segments but also the company's extensive base of B2B clients." - Maryana Lazaricheva (Head of Equity Research, T-Investments)