Drone strike shuts down Yandex data centre in Russia’s Ryazan region

A drone strike has hit a data centre belonging to Russian internet company Yandex in the town of Sasovo, located in the Ryazan region.

The company announced that a fire triggered by the attack damaged part of the infrastructure and resulted in a complete shutdown of the facility’s operations. No casualties or injuries were reported in the incident.

In a statement, Yandex said competent authorities and relevant teams were working at the scene to remediate the damage.

Owing to the facility being knocked offline, it was noted that some of the company’s online services might temporarily become inaccessible to users.

The company provided no details regarding the financial scale of the damage or when the data centre would be brought back into service.

Shares slide, cloud infrastructure curbs introduced

Following the developments, Yandex shares fell by more than 3.4% as of 10:10 Türkiye time.

A drone threat alert was reportedly communicated to residents of the Ryazan region at 23:48 on the night of 7 October, with the alarm lifted at 02:46 on the morning of 8 October. The facility in Sasovo had commenced operations in 2014.

In an advisory issued via the Yandex Cloud Alerts channel, it was reported that power issues were occurring in the system’s “ru-central1-b” availability zone.

The company stated that efforts to transfer data workloads to other availability zones had been completed and that services in other zones continued to operate normally.

However, it was noted that temporary restrictions could be imposed on the creation of new resources within the cloud infrastructure. According to data from outage-monitoring platform Downdetector, an increase in user complaints concerning Yandex, Yandex Cloud, and the real estate platform CIAN was recorded on the morning of 8 October. Reports were observed to have originated predominantly from Moscow and surrounding regions.

Data centre targeted for first time after logistics warehouses

Whether the attack directly targeted the data centre remains unconfirmed. Nevertheless, as of 8 October, this went on record as the first drone strike directed at data centres in Russia.

Beginning in the summer months of 2026, warehouses belonging to Russia’s leading e-commerce platforms had faced drone attacks.

Fires at several warehouses owned by the company Wildberries caused hundreds of billions of roubles in losses for sellers, after which logistics centres belonging to the company Ozon were also targeted.

Both companies amended their contractual terms, shifting liability for damages arising from attacks onto sellers.

Yandex facilities had previously experienced a widespread outage on 30 March 2025 due to a transformer failure, which temporarily disabled services including Yandex Cloud, Yandex Music, and Yandex Lavka.