Ukraine has struck three major data centers owned by Russian tech company Yandex in recent days, including a facility in Sasovo that houses supercomputers used to train Yandex's AI model. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the strikes as a 'symmetrical response' to Russia's own drone campaign against Ukrainian data centers and telecom networks that began in late September and disrupted service for up to 100,000 households in Kyiv.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-10-12
Yandex confirmed that drone attacks damaged three of its data centers in Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir between October 8-11, knocking two facilities offline entirely and degrading the third. Customers have reported being unable to access files stored on Yandex's cloud infrastructure, and the company says it cannot give a reliable timeline for restoring service. Yandex has urged customers to switch to alternative disaster-recovery infrastructure while its teams work to stabilize the remaining systems.
bleepingcomputer.com
· 2026-10-12
Following Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian data centers, a Cloudflare chart showing a drop in Yandex-related bot traffic spread widely on social media, with many assuming it showed Russian disinformation bots going offline. Researcher antibot4navalny says the data actually reflects a decline in Yandex's own web crawler activity, not social media bot farms, and that broader Russian bot traffic was largely unaffected. A separate chart claiming to show a drop in pro-AfD online activity, shared by EU lawmaker Tomáš Zdechovský, has been flagged by computer scientist Raphael Wimmer as possibly AI-generated.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-12
Cloudflare data shows bot traffic from Yandex's network has collapsed to just 0.4% of its two-week peak following a third Ukrainian drone strike on the company's data centers. Earlier strikes hit a Sasovo facility housing two supercomputers and a larger campus in Kaluga, while Yandex Cloud's status page lists at least 84 services currently offline. NetBlocks reports Yandex Cloud traffic down to 30% and Yandex LLC traffic down to 63%.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-11
A report indicates that a third data center belonging to Yandex Cloud has been struck, though specific details about the nature of the incident were not disclosed in the available source material.
status.yandex.cloud
· 2026-10-11
A Ukrainian drone attack hit Yandex's Kaluga data center, Russia's largest, with Russian state media outlet TASS confirming several modules were completely taken out of service. The facility, covering 1.4 million square feet with over 3,800 server racks and 63 megawatts of power capacity, had only opened in late 2023 and hosted Yandex's internal services and cloud operations.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-10
Ukraine struck Yandex data centers in Sasovo and Kaluga on October 8 and 9, knocking out two of the company's five facilities, according to Reuters. Firepoint's FP-1 drones hit the Kaluga site, Yandex's largest, while the Sasovo facility housed supercomputers used to train its YandexGPT AI model. Yandex reported no injuries but confirmed service disruptions, with Russian users unable to access apps including Ivi, T-Bank and Russian Railways.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-10-09
Russian state media TASS reported on October 9 that a drone attack hit Yandex's data center in Kaluga's Grabtsevo industrial park, completely disabling several of its modules. The facility, Yandex's largest in Russia, spans about 130,000 square meters with a planned 63-megawatt capacity and over 3,800 server racks. This comes just two days after satellite imagery showed damage from a separate drone strike on another Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region.
united24media.com
· 2026-10-09
Ukrainian drones targeted a Yandex data center in Sasovo, Russia, igniting a large fire and leading to the shutdown of the facility. The site housed two of Yandex's three supercomputers used for AI development, including the high-performance Chervonenkis system, which may have been compromised. The attack disrupted Yandex Cloud services, prompting customers to switch to alternative zones.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-08
Yandex suspended services at its Sasovo data center in Ryazan following a drone attack that caused a fire, leading to partial service disruptions. The company confirmed no casualties and noted emergency responders are managing the situation. The attack is part of broader Ukrainian efforts targeting Russian infrastructure amid ongoing tensions.
cnbc.com
· 2026-10-08
Startup Keenable, founded by former Yandex search executive Andrey Styskin and AI scientist Matthias Petri, has emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and angel investors. The company has built a search index spanning over 100 billion documents designed specifically for AI systems rather than human users, and its API is already being used by AI labs and inference providers for training and live retrieval, including a new partnership with voice AI company Gradium.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-08-25
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