Drones hit three of Yandex's main data centers in Russia between October 8 and 11, the company says, shutting two of them down completely and knocking part of the third out of service. Yandex, which runs Russia's most popular search engine along with widely used taxi, food-delivery, mail and payment apps, has not said who launched the drones. Ukraine's government has not claimed any of the three strikes by name, but President Volodymyr Zelensky, asked about the first one, said Ukraine was answering Russia's attacks on Ukrainian data centers: "We always respond in mirror-like fashion." Fire Point, the Ukrainian company that makes the FP-1 attack drone, went further, writing on October 11 that Ukraine's Defense Forces had attacked the Vladimir data center with FP-1 drones. Each side points to the other's strikes. Russia's Defense Ministry says the Ukrainian data centers it has hit since September "process and transmit intelligence data for the Ukrainian Armed Forces," a claim it has not backed with published evidence and that news organizations have not been able to verify. Ukraine has not claimed that the Yandex sites served Russia's military, and no reporting reviewed for this story shows that the Yandex sites were serving the Russian military.
What was hit
Sasovo, Ryazan region, overnight into October 8. Yandex said its Sasovo data center was "seriously damaged in a drone attack" on "the night of October 7th to 8th" and "has been completely shut down." Meduza reports that the site houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers, Lyapunov and Chervonenkis, which it says are "used to train neural networks," the technology behind AI models. Yandex has not said whether either machine was damaged. A Planet Labs satellite image, published by the Ukrainian Telegram channel Absolutely Reliable Source and reported by UNITED24 Media, shows fire damage on the roof of the main building. The data center sits on the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant, which the independent Russian outlet Astra says "provides a production base for defense enterprises"; Meduza notes that it is not clear whether the plant or the data center was the target.
Kaluga, October 9. Yandex said its Kaluga data center "was attacked" on the morning of October 9 and that "part of its infrastructure is out of service"; its press service told Russian media that several modules were completely disabled. "No employees were hurt in either Sasovo or Kaluga," the company said. Kaluga's governor, Vladislav Shapsha, reported nine people injured across the region that night and 26 drones shot down, but did not mention Yandex.
Vladimir, overnight into October 11. In a service alert, Yandex said infrastructure at its Vladimir data center "was damaged" in a drone attack, that "operations at the data centre have been completely suspended," and that "the remaining resource configuration is considered unstable." No one was injured, it said. The Vladimir site houses Galushkin, Yandex's third supercomputer. On the morning of October 11, Fire Point posted on Telegram that "the Defense Forces attacked a third data center of the Russian company Yandex, this time in Vladimir," and that "as a result of hits by FP-1 attack drones, the facility was damaged and completely stopped working" (Profoundd's translation from Ukrainian). The company is a private manufacturer, not a government body, and Ukraine's military has not confirmed its account. When Yandex's fintech chief, Dima Pirogov, posted on X that "another Yandex data center was damaged," Fire Point replied: "Dima, have you tried turning it off and on again?" According to Kommersant, the three sites have a combined capacity of about 115 megawatts.
Who lost service
The outages reached well past Yandex's own apps. Russian users reported problems with Yandex Mail, Disk, Pay, the Go taxi app, the Alice voice assistant and some smart-home devices. Businesses that rent computing from Yandex Cloud, which lists about 64,000 customers, went down with it: The Moscow Times and Kommersant named the online retailer Wildberries, the retailers Magnit and M.Video and the fast-food chain Vkusno i Tochka, and Meduza reported problems at Pulkovo airport and at continuous glucose monitoring services used by people with diabetes. Users in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia and Belarus also lost access. Yandex Pro, the company's app for drivers, advised them to use Google Maps or Waze. Yandex reached agreements with the rival cloud providers VK Cloud, Selectel and K2Cloud to help customers move their data and services, and changed its terms of service to exclude liability for obligations missed because of drone attacks. "I can't get anything to work at all," a 69-year-old Yandex taxi driver near Moscow told AFP. On October 11 Yandex said it had restored access to Alice, Search, Maps, Mail and other services, though not every feature worked, and some services were still interrupted on October 12. The company said it is "very difficult to say when the equipment at the data centers will be back up and running"; industry analysts told Kommersant that replacing it could take up to six months.
Is Yandex tied to the Russian state?
The reported links between Yandex and the Russian state concern ownership and location, not documented military use. The exiled outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe reported in September that a large stake in Yandex is controlled by people linked to Bank Rossiya and President Vladimir Putin's inner circle, following the 2024 sale of the company's Russian business. The Sasovo site shares grounds with a plant that Astra links to defense production, as described above. Neither fact shows what the data centers were computing, and no reporting reviewed for this story, from Russian, Ukrainian or Western outlets, has shown Yandex's computers doing military work.
What Kyiv says it is answering
Russia's Defense Ministry announced a strike on a Ukrainian data center, B-Mobile, as early as September 11, saying it "provides data storage, processing and transmission, including intelligence data," for Ukraine's armed forces, according to TASS. The strikes on data centers and internet providers intensified in late September. On September 23 a strike damaged a Kyiv data center holding the network equipment of the provider UTELS, a disruption that Ukraine's Digital Transformation Ministry said affected about 100,000 households in and around Kyiv. MiroHost's data center was destroyed on September 24. Datagroup's was damaged on September 25, and the company said its services kept running from backup sites. Cosmonova's was hit on September 25 and knocked out on September 26, interrupting several TV channels, among them the military media outlet Armiia TV, as well as the video players on the public broadcaster Suspilne's website. Russia's Defense Ministry said on September 26 that it was hitting the centers because they serve Ukraine's military, as quoted above, and on September 27 posted a drone image captioned "Digital detox," with the comment "Mandatory!" Russia has named facilities, but it has not published evidence for its claim about any of them.
Is a data center a lawful target?
No court or international body has ruled on either side's data-center strikes. The general test is in the 1977 First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions: an object may be attacked only if it makes "an effective contribution to military action" and destroying it offers "a definite military advantage," and attackers must take "all feasible precautions" to spare civilians. In an April analysis of strikes on Amazon data centers in the Gulf, researchers at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research wrote that a facility serving both civilian and military purposes may become a target, and asked whether the data stored inside such a facility could itself be one. Applying that test to Datagroup or to Yandex would require knowing what the buildings were running, and neither government has made that public. Moscow says the Ukrainian sites served military intelligence; Kyiv has called its own strikes retaliation rather than claiming the Yandex sites had a military role.
Zelensky's claim about bots
Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12, Zelensky said the strikes had changed the tone of social media: "There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots," adding that it was "pretty clear where those bots were coming from." He did not cite data. Supporters of the claim have pointed to a Cloudflare Radar chart showing automated traffic from Yandex at about 0.4% of its recent peak; the Czech member of the European Parliament Tomas Zdechovsky posted it with the comment "if confirmed, this is telling." Meduza separately cited unnamed cybersecurity experts saying Russian bot traffic fell to 49% of its usual level, without saying how that was measured. Researchers quoted by RFE/RL say the chart does not measure what Zelensky described. The Japanese technology site XenoSpectrum wrote that it counts "HTTP requests from AS13238, a network operated by Yandex," and shows neither Russia's total internet traffic nor the volume of messages on any social network; researchers cited by RFE/RL said the drop comes mostly from Yandex's own web crawlers, the programs that index pages for its search engine. The operator of antibot4navalny, a project that tracks Russian state-backed propaganda accounts, said the chart "has little to do with malicious propaganda bots on social media." Profoundd found no published measurement of propaganda-account activity on social networks before and after the strikes.
How Russia has responded
"Yandex faced an unprecedented attack," Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev told a State Duma committee on October 12, according to Interfax. "The Digital Development Ministry, together with the Defense Ministry, is working on the issue of protecting these facilities." He did not say what measures were under consideration. Meduza reported that the State Duma said the responsibility for protecting data centers lies with the companies themselves. As of October 12 the Kremlin had not commented.
The same nights
The Kaluga strike came amid wider attacks. Russia's Defense Ministry said it "intercepted and destroyed 505 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones" over 19 regions on the night of October 8 to 9. That night a fire broke out at the Redkino Experimental Chemical Plant in the Tver region after a drone attack; Tver's governor said it was put out and that workers reached a shelter in time. Ukraine's SBU security service said after an earlier strike that the plant makes components of Decilin-M, a fuel used in Russia's Kh-55 and Kh-101 cruise missiles. Ukraine's military said that night's targets included a factory in the Tver region making missile components and a center in the Nizhny Novgorod region that dismantles intercontinental ballistic missiles.
What is not known
Yandex has not said whether its three supercomputers survived; the Ukrainian outlet Defense Express reports that all three are out of service, which Yandex has not confirmed. Yandex has not said how many of its cloud customers lost service. No statement from Ukraine's government or military has named Yandex or confirmed any of the three strikes individually; the only Ukrainian claim of a specific strike so far comes from the drone's manufacturer. And neither government has published anything showing what the data centers it struck were running, which is the fact on which both the Russian and the Ukrainian strikes would be judged under the laws of war.
Sources: Yandex, company statement, October 9, 2026; AFP via Yahoo News, October 11; Al Jazeera (AFP and Reuters), October 9; Kyiv Independent, October 9, and September 26; The Record, October 12; Meduza, October 8, October 12 and September 28; The Moscow Times, October 12 and October 12; RFE/RL, October 12; UNITED24 Media, October 9; Kyiv Post, October 9; Militarnyi, October 9; UNIDIR, "Clouds of war: The implications of targeting data centres", April 23, 2026; TASS, September 11; Fire Point on Telegram, October 11; Defense Express, October 11; Kyiv Independent via Yahoo News, October 12.
