Ukraine Hits Yandex Data Centres: Why Computing Is Now a Target
Ukrainian drones hit two of Yandex's five data centres in central Russia on 8-9 October, shutting one site completely and leaving the company struggling to keep its wider network online. BBC
Yandex, which runs Russia's most-used search engine plus food-ordering and taxi apps used by tens of millions, said its Sasovo facility in the Ryazan region was seriously damaged overnight into Thursday, 8 October. Operations there were fully suspended. A second strike hit its Kaluga site on the morning of Friday, 9 October, taking part of that infrastructure out of service.
On Friday the company said the centres were critical for normal operation of its services. It said it was very difficult to predict when they would be back online. No employees were injured. The Sasovo strike caused a fire, according to earlier company statements, and Yandex said it could not yet tell if equipment at the site could be restored. Reuters
The effects are already reaching users and engineers. A data centre works like a warehouse of computers that powers apps and websites. Yandex told Tass that some functions of its AI chatbot were temporarily unavailable and that smart-home devices may face problems. Sasovo houses two of three supercomputers used to develop the company's AI model. Kaluga, which Yandex has described as one of Russia's largest data centres, covers 130,000 sqm and consumes as much electricity in a year as 220,000 UK households.
The regional governor in Kaluga said nine people were injured in a drone attack on the city's infrastructure. Ukraine's defence ministry confirmed the attacks and said they could force Russia to divert resources to repairs. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes were a response to weeks of Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres, describing Kyiv's action as responding in a mirror-like fashion. Moscow has justified its own attacks by saying the centres were used by Ukrainian military intelligence. Last month, a Russian drone hit a business centre in Kyiv, killing four people and damaging a data centre. About 100,000 households in Kyiv and the region suffered internet outages due to those strikes. The Sasovo strike was the first major attack on a Russian data hub.
The broader context here is a shift from energy and transport targets to the computing layer behind civilian life and military work. Each side frames data centres as dual-use (for civilian and military use) and therefore targetable, while citing the other's prior strikes as precedent. If search, taxi dispatch, food ordering, AI training clusters and smart-home controls can be degraded by long-range drones, repair and backup costs rise sharply. Ukraine's defence ministry has made that resource-diversion point explicit.
What to watch next is whether casualties stay limited. Both sides have so far reported low numbers from these specific infrastructure strikes, four killed in Kyiv last month and nine injured in Kaluga this week, alongside wider service outages. That pattern will shape diplomatic responses and debate about proportionality. For now, Yandex faces a technical recovery problem with no timeline, and both capitals have publicly tied data-centre targeting to the other's conduct.
