Drone attacks on three Yandex data centers disrupted more than 80 services
Two facilities stopped operating, and the outages were felt by companies using Yandex Cloud, from a bank to the railways. Yandex advised customers to activate their own disaster recovery plans.
Between October 8 and 11, Ukrainian drones struck three Yandex data centers in Russia: in Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir. The facilities in Sasovo and Vladimir completely stopped operating, while the center in Kaluga was damaged. This is reported by, among others, ITwiz (opens in a new tab) and Ars Technica (opens in a new tab).
In Sasovo and Vladimir, there are three supercomputers on which Yandex trained the YandexGPT model. The center in Kaluga, launched in 2023, has a capacity of 63 MW and more than 3,800 server racks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the strikes a “symmetrical response” to Russian attacks that, since the end of September, have damaged the infrastructure of at least eight Ukrainian companies and temporarily cut off up to 100,000 households in Kyiv from the internet.
The problems affected more than 80 Yandex services, including the search engine, cloud, payments, ride-hailing, and food delivery. According to NetBlocks, an organization monitoring internet connectivity, after the October 11 attack Yandex Cloud connectivity dropped to about 30 percent of normal. Cloud customers felt the outages, including Russian Railways, operator MegaFon, T-Bank, and the Avito service, and disruptions were also recorded in Kazakhstan.
Yandex did not provide a timeline for rebuilding. An IT expert quoted by the newspaper “Kommersant” speaks of up to six months to replace the hardware, while experts cited by ITwiz say restoring AI computing capacity will take at least until 2028, among other reasons because of sanctions on Nvidia chips. The company advised customers to activate their own disaster recovery procedures, offered replacement servers, and reached agreements with providers Selectel, K2Cloud, and VK Cloud regarding data migration.
Earlier, drone attacks on AWS data centers in the Middle East had similar effects. Nearly half a year later, the company reported that it had not restored access to resources and data stored exclusively in the Bahrain region and in one availability zone (a separate part of a region with separate power and networking) in the United Arab Emirates. For companies dependent on the cloud, this means that redundancy within a single provider region does not replace a backup stored outside it.