Yandex Shuts Vladimir Data Center After Third Drone Strike

Russia's Yandex says the drone attack that hit its Vladimir data centre on Sunday completely halted operations at the site, with no injuries reported. Al Jazeera reported it is the third Yandex compute facility knocked offline in four days.

"Operations at the data centre have been completely suspended," the company said, warning that "The remaining resource configuration is considered unstable." More than 80 Yandex Cloud services stopped working, including the YandexGPT API, databases and storage, networking resources, and tools for developers and businesses.

The October 8 strike on Yandex's Sasovo facility took out two of three supercomputers the company uses for AI development. A Kaluga region site was partially disabled on October 9.

"We always respond in mirror-like fashion," Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, framing the attacks as retaliation for Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres. "They have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres. We are responding. I can't share all the details."

Yandex, sometimes called "Russia's Google," is heavily involved in Russia's AI development. It is the third hit on Yandex compute in a week on our AI Weekly radar; our page on the Sasovo strike went up three days ago.