Yandex shuts its Vladimir data centre after a drone attack, the third strike on its data centres in a week

Yandex said on 11 October that a drone attack had damaged its infrastructure and shut down its data centre in the Vladimir region, Reuters and Al Jazeera reported. Yandex Cloud posted the news on its Telegram alerts channel, saying operations at the data centre had been completely suspended and that it considered the remaining resource configuration unstable.

Kommersant reported that the alerts channel described the platform as running in emergency mode and first flagged a power failure in one availability zone at 04:12 Moscow time. Yandex said no one was injured, but some of its services were unavailable.

It was the third attack on Yandex data centres in about a week, Al Jazeera reported. On 8 October an attack shut down Yandex's Sasovo hub, south-east of Moscow, which houses two of the three supercomputers the company uses to develop its AI model, Reuters reported. On 9 October, drones partly put its Kaluga-region data centre out of action. Reuters attributed the Sasovo and Kaluga strikes to Ukraine; reports did not say who carried out the Vladimir strike.

Reuters described Yandex as heavily involved in Russia's AI development. The strikes show AI computing capacity becoming a military target. Yandex's own Telegram post could not be opened from here, so its words are carried as three named outlets reported them.

• Claimed Yandex said operations at the Vladimir data centre had been completely suspended, Al Jazeera reported. Al Jazeera
• Reported The Yandex Cloud alerts channel described the platform as running in emergency mode, Kommersant reported. Kommersant
• Reported The Sasovo hub, shut by an attack on 8 October, houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI model, Reuters reported. Reuters via The Star
• Reported It was the third attack on Yandex's data centres in the last week, Al Jazeera reported. Al Jazeera