A drone strike has hit a data centre operated by Yandex, Russia’s largest technology and AI company, marking the first major attack on a Russian data hub since the start of the war in Ukraine. The incident comes as both Russia and Ukraine continue to expand their drone campaigns, with attacks increasingly targeting critical infrastructure, including energy facilities, oil refineries, ports, warehouses and now data centres.
Russia has carried out a series of attacks on Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications infrastructure over the past month, including sites in central Kyiv.
Yandex said a drone attack on its Sasovo facility, one of its five major data centres, sparked a fire and forced the company to temporarily shut down operations at the site, which houses tens of thousands of servers. The company said work was underway to restore affected services.
Often referred to as “Russia’s Google”, Yandex said its main consumer services were not disrupted, but did not provide details about the extent of the damage.
On the website of its Yandex Cloud service, the company advised customers there were problems with the electricity supply to one data centre “zone” and recommended using others.
Yandex said in 2021 that the Sasovo hub hosted two of its three supercomputers built around Nvidia A100 chips, which it uses to train its YandexGPT large AI model. Yandex declined to say whether the supercomputers were affected by the attack.
Multiple online services in Russia reported technical issues on Thursday, including real estate aggregator Cian, a book portal called Litmarket, and the websites of Russian Railways and professional football club Spartak Moscow.
A state-owned bus company in the Moscow region said online ticket sales were currently unavailable due to the “temporary shutdown of a data centre”.
Online monitoring service Detector404 said it had received 58,268 user complaints over the past day. Yandex shares at the Moscow Exchange, where it is a proxy stock for the Russian technology sector, were down 3%.
Previous Ukrainian attacks on Russia have led to fuel shortages and queues at petrol stations, losses for tens of thousands of small businesses involved in e-commerce, and higher inflation as rising fuel costs feed through to consumer prices.
Critically Important Infrastructure
Russian President Vladimir Putin in August gave the state the power to take control of critically important infrastructure if it is deemed to be poorly protected from drone attacks.
There were previously no confirmed major Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian data centres.
Russia’s RBC news outlet reported on Thursday, quoting sources, that businesses were in talks with the government on developing data centres in countries deemed “friendly” by Moscow.
Some Ukrainian data centres were forced to suspend operations after sustaining damage, while 100,000 households suffered temporary internet outages after one attack.
Ukraine’s digital minister told Reuters last month that the country was moving digital infrastructure underground in response to Russian attacks.
Yandex, which created Russia’s first search engine in 1997 and is one of the few major Russian companies not under Western sanctions, runs YandexGPT, one of Russia’s leading AI models, as well as a cloud computing service and a range of other consumer products, including Yandex Taxi and Yandex Music.
Sberbank, Yandex’s main domestic competitor, which is developing the rival GigaChat model, says Russian AI developers lag their US and Chinese counterparts by six to nine months, with difficulties in importing advanced chips due to sanctions seen as the main bottleneck.
(With inputs from Reuters)
