Second Yandex Data Centre Disabled by Drone Attack in Two Days, Company Warns of Service Disruptions

Russian technology and artificial intelligence company Yandex said on Friday that a drone attack had completely disabled several modules at its data centre in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, the second attack on one of its facilities in two days, according to Reuters.

Yandex said no one was injured in the Kaluga attack and warned that some of its services may be disrupted, Reuters reported. The company did not give a timeline for restoring the damaged modules.

A larger facility hit a day earlier

The Kaluga strike followed an attack on Thursday on another Yandex data centre in the Ryazan region, southeast of the capital, where the company houses two of the three supercomputers used to develop its artificial intelligence model, according to Reuters. Yandex said it was still assessing the damage at that site and could not confirm whether the equipment could be restored.

The Register reported that operations at the Ryazan-area facility in Sasovo were completely halted and that a Yandex Cloud availability zone was down, with the company advising users that service would not be restored in the near future.

Data centres become targets in the war

Ukraine has not been named by Yandex as the source of the drones, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday that Ukraine responds in kind after Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres, according to Reuters. Reuters reported that Russia has carried out a strike campaign against Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications infrastructure over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv.

Both countries have widened drone attacks this year beyond the battlefield to economic targets including energy facilities and refineries, ports and vessels carrying oil and grain, and e-commerce warehouses, with data centres now among the targets, according to Reuters.

Reporting based on coverage by Reuters and The Register.