Ukrainian Drone Strikes Hit Yandex Data Centers in Russia, Disrupting Services

A Ukrainian drone attack set fire to a Yandex data center in the town of Sasovo, in Russia's Ryazan region, overnight into October 8, 2026, according to the company and Russian regional authorities. Yandex said the facility's operations were "fully suspended" while emergency crews worked to contain the fire, and the Moscow Times and NTV both reported no casualties among staff.

Ryazan regional governor Pavel Malkov said two drones were shot down over the region, with one igniting a fire on the roof of a facility, according to reporting carried by NTV. Videos circulating on social media and shown by Euronews showed thick black smoke rising from the building.

What was hit

The Sasovo site sits on the grounds of the former Sasta machine-tool factory and houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers, named "Lyapunov" and "Chervonenkis," used to train the company's neural networks, Meduza and NBC News reported. Chervonenkis had ranked 19th on the global Top 500 supercomputer list in 2021 before falling in the rankings amid sanctions-related constraints, according to Meduza.

Yandex said on its Yandex Cloud status page that one data-center zone had "problems with electricity supply" and advised business customers to switch to alternative zones, NBC News reported. The outage-tracking platform Downdetector logged more than 1,300 user reports tied to Yandex Cloud, Yandex Documents and Yandex Tables, while Yandex said core consumer tools such as search and the taxi app remained largely operational.

Yandex shares fell more than 3.4% in morning trading on the Moscow Exchange that day, according to the Moscow Times and Meduza.

A second strike, in Kaluga

Yandex reported a second attack overnight into October 9, this time hitting a data center in Russia's Kaluga region. The company said no employees were hurt there but that "several data center modules have been completely disabled," warning that some services could see further disruption, according to Meduza's coverage of the incident.

Yandex described its data centers as the company's "iron heart," saying keeping them running was critical to services that have become part of people's daily lives, Meduza reported. Separately, nine people were reported injured, five of them hospitalized, in the wider Kaluga region attack that night, according to the same report.

Attribution and context

Ukraine's military General Staff claimed responsibility for the Sasovo strike, saying it had "ignited a fire" at the facility, the Moscow Times reported. NTV separately reported that Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation, said Ukrainian forces struck the Yandex data center in the Ryazan region. Meduza and NBC News, by contrast, reported that Ukraine had not officially commented on the Sasovo strike at the time of their reporting.

On the Kaluga strike, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky referred to retaliatory action without detailing specific targets. "You all know they have struck our data centers and are still striking them. We responded," he said, according to Meduza's translation.

The Moscow Times and NBC News reported that the Ryazan strike was the first confirmed Ukrainian attack on Russian data infrastructure since the full-scale invasion began in 2022, coming weeks after Russia struck Ukrainian data centers in the Kyiv area, causing widespread internet blackouts there. Russia's Defense Ministry said it intercepted 399 Ukrainian drones across 18 regions and Crimea the same night as the Sasovo strike, the Moscow Times reported.

What remains unknown

Yandex said it could not yet give a timeline for restoring equipment at the Ryazan site, according to Anadolu Agency's report. Independent verification of the attacks' precise scale was not available beyond the statements from Yandex, Russian regional authorities, and the Ukrainian officials cited above.