Russia's largest Yandex data center reportedly hit in drone attack

Russia's largest Yandex data center, located in the Ryazan Oblast, was reportedly damaged in an overnight drone attack, leading to disruptions in the company's cloud services. OSINT groups Exilenova+ and ASTRA identified the affected site as Yandex DC Sasovo in the city of Sasovo.

Yandex Cloud confirmed an "incident" and power supply problems affecting its "ru-central1-b availability zone," with disruptions beginning around 1:31 a.m. Moscow time. The company warned that the outage could impact other parts of its cloud network and advised customers to relocate services while engineers worked to restore operations. Exilenova+ also reported that some Yandex services experienced disruptions following the strike, though public outage monitors did not indicate widespread issues across Yandex's main consumer services.

The Sasovo data center is situated on the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant, a manufacturer of metalworking machines used in various Russian industries, including defense, aerospace, and heavy machinery. The Sasta plant has been under U.K. sanctions since 2024 due to its involvement in Russia's defense sector. It remains unclear whether the drone attack targeted the Yandex data center, the Sasta plant, or both facilities. In 2022, Ryazan Governor Pavel Malkov described the Sasovo complex as a high-tech facility housing tens of thousands of servers.