Ukrainian Drones Hit Yandex Data Center Housing AI Supercomputers in Russia

Drone Strike Hits Yandex Data Center in Sasovo

Ukrainian drones struck a major Yandex data center in Sasovo, Russia, causing a massive fire and forcing the company to shut down the facility, according to Reuters and Meduza. The attack disrupted Yandex Cloud infrastructure, and the company is recommending customers switch to alternative zones. Although Yandex stated that its key consumer services remained operational, users reported problems with Yandex Mail, Disk, Documents, Pay, and Market.

Two AI Supercomputers at Risk

The Sasovo facility, one of Yandex's five major data centers, accommodates tens of thousands of servers, including two Nvidia A100-based supercomputers named Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. Chervonenkis, the company's most powerful system, was ranked 19th on the Top 500 list in 2021, but its 21.53 FP64 PFLOPS now places it only 101st. Due to Western sanctions, Yandex can no longer upgrade the system. Both machines have been used to train AI models, including YandexGPT, Russia's leading large language model. Yandex's third supercomputer, Galushkin, is located in Vladimir. The company has not disclosed whether the supercomputers were affected, though the scale of the fire suggests their chances of survival are low.

Outages Ripple Across Russian Services

Beyond Yandex's own products, the incident affected numerous third-party services. Reported disruptions included Cian, Litmarket, Russian Railways, Spartak Moscow, cryptocurrency exchange Rapira, Astral, and 1C business solutions. Corporate systems operated by T-Bank, Ozon, and Wildberries also experienced problems, according to Meduza. A Moscow-region bus operator suspended online ticket sales, while Detector404 registered 58,268 complaints over 24 hours. Several Russian media outlets, including RIA Novosti, Vesti, and Interfax, were also down following the attack on what RBC described as an "infrastructure partner."

Escalating Attacks on Digital Infrastructure

The data center occupies former premises of the Sasta machine-tool factory, where Yandex established operations in 2014. Sasta manufactures industrial equipment supplied to Russian manufacturers, including defense-related enterprises, and is under Western sanctions. Regional authorities reported a fire at an industrial facility, but it remains unknown whether the intended target was the factory or Yandex's computing infrastructure. The incident follows Russian strikes against Ukrainian telecommunications and computing facilities. Since September 23, attacks have damaged or destroyed data centers belonging to at least eight Ukrainian companies, including Virtual Systems, MiroHost, CosmoNova, DataGroup, and CityHost. Popular torrent trackers 1337x and NordicQuality temporarily went offline after servers hosting them were damaged. Ukraine is consequently moving some digital infrastructure underground, while Russian businesses are discussing deployments in countries considered friendly by Moscow, which is probably limited to just a few states, including China.

Sources: Tom'S Hardware · Techmeme