Yandex Says Vladimir Data Center Is Completely Shut Down After Drone Strike, Third Site Hit in Four Days

Since Thursday, Oct. 8, when a Ukrainian strike shut down Yandex's data hub in Sasovo, the company has lost or partly lost three data centers in three Russian regions. The latest is in Vladimir, east of Moscow, which Yandex said overnight into Sunday, Oct. 11, had its infrastructure damaged and operations "completely suspended."

No one was injured, the company said. Services were another matter.

What Yandex and the governor say

Yandex posted a service alert on Telegram telling cloud customers to activate disaster-recovery plans. The platform was running in emergency mode, it said, and the "remaining resource configuration is considered unstable." It also warned that technical support communications could be disrupted.

Vladimir Governor Aleksandr Avdeyev confirmed a drone hit an infrastructure facility near the city and started a fire. He said residential areas escaped destruction, though residents of the nearest buildings were evacuated.

Two electrical substations went offline, cutting power to about 5,000 residents. Avdeyev said about an hour later that 80% of supply had been restored, along with heating and water.

An outage notice for the ru-central1-a availability zone appeared around 4:00 a.m., according to reports on the Yandex Cloud status message. That zone is hosted at Yandex's own data center in Vladimir's Energetik neighborhood. The first site there opened in 2017, and Yandex commissioned a new 40-megawatt facility nearby in March 2026, designed to hold 2,800 server racks.

The damage to services

The outage reached across Yandex Cloud and into consumer products. Yandex Music, Yandex Home, Telemost video conferencing and the Alice voice assistant were affected. Business customers lost computing, storage, databases and AI tools such as the YandexGPT API. Ukrainian outlets and a crypto-industry newsletter put the number of disrupted services at more than 80. Yandex has not confirmed that figure.

Yandex runs Russia's most popular search engine, plus food-ordering and taxi apps used by tens of millions of people. It is often called "Russia's Google." The company said it is still assessing the damage and cannot say how long repairs will take.

Three sites in four days

The Sasovo facility in the Ryazan region was shut down on Oct. 8 and caught fire. It houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI model.

The Kaluga site, southwest of Moscow, was hit on Oct. 9 and partly put out of action. After the first two strikes, Yandex said its data centers were critical to normal operation of its services and that it was "very difficult to predict" when they would be back online.

The company has five large data centers. Three have now been hit.

Shares of Yandex fell nearly 4% on the Moscow Exchange after the second strike, according to a crypto-industry newsletter's account of trading. That is a price move, not a measure of anyone's realized losses.

Kyiv's stated rationale

Ukraine has not detailed its targeting, but its president has described the campaign as a response in kind. "We always respond in mirror-like fashion," Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday after the Sasovo strike. "You all know, they have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres. We are responding. I can't share all the details."

Kyiv has also said it is going after places that provide revenue streams for Moscow's war machine, and that the damage could force Russia to divert resources to repairs.

Russia has struck Ukrainian data centers and telecom facilities over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv. Those attacks caused internet outages and led some firms to move servers abroad.

The wider weekend

The strikes came hours after Donald Trump said Ukraine should "damn well stop" attacking Russian oil refineries so Moscow can release more diesel to the global market. That demand concerns refineries. The Yandex strikes hit data centers, and no one has said the two are linked.

Russian attacks on Ukraine continued through the weekend. Local officials said at least 20 people, including four children, were killed in Russian attacks on Zaporizhzhia on Saturday. Overnight, six people were injured in four districts of the Dnipropetrovsk region, according to Ukraine's State Emergency Service.

On Sunday morning Russian forces hit two apartment blocks in Sloviansk. Mayor Vadym Liakh said four people were injured. Zelensky said people may be trapped under the rubble.

Warehouses at an industrial plant in the Bucha district outside Kyiv caught fire after an overnight attack. A paramedic and a driver were injured when a Russian drone hit an ambulance in the Sumy region, according to regional military administration head Oleh Hryhorov.

Ukrenergo, the national grid operator, introduced emergency power cuts in several regions on Sunday. It said the earlier published hourly outage schedules are not currently in force, and the emergency cuts will end when the power system stabilizes.

What comes next

It is not yet known how long Yandex's cloud and AI operations stay degraded. The company has not given a restoration timeline for any of the three sites. It also has not said whether its remaining two data centers have been moved onto heightened protection.

Zelensky's "mirror" framing leaves another question: whether Russia answers the Yandex strikes with more attacks on Ukrainian digital infrastructure.