Yandex Suspends Sasovo Data Center After Ukrainian Drone Fire

Yandex suspended operations at a major data center in Sasovo, in Russia's Ryazan region, after a Ukrainian drone strike sparked a fire at the site on October 8, in what Reuters called the "first major attack on a Russian data hub since the start of the war with Ukraine."

The Sasovo hub is one of five large Yandex data centres and hosts tens of thousands of servers, including two Nvidia A100-based supercomputers named Chervonenkis and Lyapunov, both used to train AI models including YandexGPT, Russia's leading large language model. The company, often dubbed "Russia's Google", said its core consumer services were not affected, but did not describe the extent of the damage. Tom's Hardware noted that Yandex has not disclosed whether its supercomputers were affected by the strike, "though judging by the massive fire caused by the drone incident, the systems' chances of survival are low."

The outage spread. Downdetector recorded more than 1,300 user reports of disruptions affecting Yandex Cloud, Yandex Documents and Yandex Tables. NetBlocks confirmed "a significant disruption to the network of Russian internet and cloud giant Yandex," with connectivity falling to around 70 percent of normal levels. Problems also surfaced in the corporate systems of T-Bank, Ozon and Wildberries.

Reuters framed the strike in a wider pattern: "Mutual drone attacks by Russia and Ukraine this year have gradually spread across the economy, from energy facilities and refineries to ports and vessels carrying oil and grain, e-commerce warehouses and, most recently, data centres." It is the first entry in our AI Infrastructure tracker, which has logged 444 stories over the past 90 days, where the news is a hub being destroyed rather than built.

No casualties were reported.