Drones Hit a Yandex Data Centre in Russia's Ryazan Region, Forcing a Full Shutdown
Yandex said drones hit its data centre in Russia's Ryazan region on Oct. 8, causing a fire and forcing it to fully suspend the site's operations; it said core consumer services were not affected. Russian outlets put the site in Sasovo. Reuters noted there had previously been no confirmed major Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian data centres. Ukrainian authorities had not commented, per Anadolu, and Yandex did not say who launched the drones.
Russia's leading AI company has lost a data centre, at least for now, to a drone strike. Drones hit a major data centre owned by Yandex in Russia's Ryazan region, causing a fire and forcing the company to fully suspend the centre's operations, Yandex said on October 8, according to Reuters (via The Straits Times). The company said it was dealing with the consequences and restoring affected services, and that its core consumer services were not affected. Yandex runs YandexGPT, one of Russia's leading generative AI models.
What Yandex and local officials said
- Location: Interfax and Anadolu put the data centre in Sasovo. Interfax says the site launched in 2014.
- Yandex's wording: its press service told Interfax there had been an "incident" affecting part of its infrastructure, that no one was hurt, and that the data centre's work had been fully stopped. Anadolu, citing TASS, says Yandex told the agency a fire caused by the drone attack broke out at the Sasovo site.
- Cloud customers: on its Yandex Cloud site, the company reported electricity supply problems at one data-centre "zone" and recommended customers use other zones, Reuters said.
- Local officials: Ryazan governor Pavel Malkov said two drones were shot down overnight, the roof of a local enterprise caught fire, and windows were blown out in several private homes, with no casualties, per Anadolu. He did not name the enterprise.
Who launched them
Yandex did not say. Anadolu reported that Ukrainian authorities had yet to comment. Reuters placed the strike after "a wave of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres in recent weeks," and noted that previously there were "no confirmed major Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian data centres."
What the shutdown shows
Reuters' headline calls it the first major attack on a Russian data hub, and it took a site belonging to the company behind YandexGPT fully offline. Yandex's statement that core consumer services kept running, with cloud customers routed to other zones, suggests its redundancy largely held this time, though Yandex also said some services may be unavailable to users, according to Interfax and Anadolu. The company has not said how long the site will stay down or what it hosted.
Limits
- Yandex has not said how long the site will be offline, what workloads it ran, or whether YandexGPT capacity was affected.
- Yandex did not identify the drones' origin, and Ukraine had not commented when Anadolu published. This article does not attribute the strike.
- The governor's account of a burning enterprise roof does not name Yandex; the link to the data centre is the company's own statement.
Sources
- The Straits Times (Reuters): Drones hit Yandex data centre in first major attack on Russian data hub (October 8, 2026)
- Interfax: «Яндекс» устраняет последствия инцидента в дата-центре в Сасово (Yandex dealing with aftermath of incident at Sasovo data centre) (October 8, 2026)
- Anadolu Agency: Drone strike causes fire at Yandex data centre in Russia's Ryazan region (October 8, 2026)