Russian technology and artificial intelligence company Yandex said a data center in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow, has gone offline after being hit in a drone attack. According to the company, there were no casualties in the incident.
Yandex said emergency crews were on site, while some of its services were inaccessible to users. The company said it was working to restore its systems.
In a service notice posted on Telegram, Yandex wrote: “Operations at the data center have been halted entirely,” and advised users to activate disaster recovery measures as the platform runs in emergency mode. The company also warned that “the remaining resource configuration is considered unstable” and said contact with technical support could be disrupted while engineering teams assess the damage.
It is the third strike on Yandex data centers in the past week, as Russia and Ukraine continue to escalate attacks targeting each other's technology infrastructure.
On Friday, Yandex — a company deeply involved in Russia's AI development and sometimes called “Russia's Google” — said its data center in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, was hit by a Ukrainian drone and partially disabled.
A day earlier, a Ukrainian attack knocked out Yandex's data center in Sasovo, southeast of Moscow. That site houses two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company's AI models.
Speaking on Thursday after the Sasovo attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said: “We always respond in a proportionate way. All of you know they have been and are attacking our data centers. We are responding. I cannot share every detail.”
Over the past month, Russia has struck numerous data centers and telecommunications infrastructure in Ukraine, including targets in central Kyiv, apparently aiming to disrupt the country's connectivity and digital commerce.
