Drone Strikes Disrupt Yandex Data Centres and Services

Drone attacks have disrupted several Yandex data centres in a series of incidents in early October. An initial report said a facility in eastern Moscow was disrupted, without confirming it had been destroyed. Subsequent reports said Yandex shut down its Vladimir region data centre after an attack over October 10–11 damaged infrastructure and caused a fire. No injuries were reported, but more than 80 services—including Yandex Cloud, YandexGPT, Yandex Music and the Go taxi app—were affected. The 50-megawatt site can accommodate up to 2,880 server racks. The Vladimir incident was reported as the third strike on a Yandex data centre in four days, following attacks on sites in Ryazan and Kaluga. The Ryazan fire halted operations at a facility housing tens of thousands of servers and two of Yandex’s three AI supercomputers; the Kaluga strike affected cloud and AI services. Yandex shares fell nearly 4% after an earlier strike. The incidents underscore the physical security and concentration risks facing data centres and digital services, though no direct cryptocurrency price impact is identified.