Yandex Vladimir Data Centre Shut After Drone Strike, Third in a Week
Yandex said on Oct. 11, 2026 that its data centre in Vladimir, east of Moscow, was shut down after a drone attack.
No injuries were reported. Emergency workers were at the site. Several of the company's services stopped working for users after the attack, according to the company statement reported by Al Jazeera.
In a Telegram service alert, Yandex said operations at Vladimir were completely suspended. It advised users to activate disaster-recovery plans, the backup systems companies use to restore service after a failure.
The strike happened early Sunday morning, Oct. 11. The site was described as a 50-megawatt facility, a measure of power use that points to a large site, according to the Kyiv Post. The regional governor confirmed a fire following the attack. The incident caused a major cloud outage, Ukrainska Pravda reported. Cloud here means computing services and storage run from remote servers.
The Vladimir shutdown was reported as the third attack on Yandex data centres within a week. Other accounts put the same sequence as three strikes in four days.
On Oct. 9, Ukrainian drones had hit a second Yandex data centre in two days, The Moscow Times reported. Yandex said its facility in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, was struck by Ukrainian drones and partly put out of action.
Kaluga Region Governor Vladislav Shapsha said nine people were injured by Ukrainian drones and that infrastructure was damaged.
A separate Ukrainian attack shut down Yandex's data hub in Sasovo, southeast of Moscow. Two of three supercomputers used to develop Yandex's AI model are housed there.
An earlier strike in the sequence was described as the first major attack on a Russian data hub, Reuters reported. That strike caused a fire to break out at a Yandex data centre. Ukraine used FP-1 one-way attack drones in a strike against what it called Yandex's biggest data centre, according to a later Reuters report.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was responding in mirror-like fashion to Russian hits on data centres.
The broader context here is a change in target selection. Compute buildings sit upstream of online services, company backup systems and AI training. A complete suspension, plus a call to use disaster-recovery plans, points to loss of main capacity rather than slower service. The practical question is whether backup sites can take over and how long it takes to restore saved work.
Looking at escalation dynamics, the mirror-like language matters. It frames data-centre strikes as a reply rather than something new. That wording makes normal a type of target that had played a smaller role in long-range attacks. Once server halls and power systems on both sides are treated as fair targets, defending them is harder than defending spread-out energy sites.
In my view, specialists will focus most on Sasovo. Two of three powerful computers for AI work in one place creates a bottleneck, like two of three engines kept in one room. Even a short loss can pause training runs and testing. How large the pause is depends on backups, saved checkpoints and whether connections and storage survived intact. None of that was disclosed.
For customers tracking the outage, effects rarely spread evenly. Some customers switch to backups cleanly. Others discover dependencies only during a failure. The advice to activate disaster-recovery plans suggests Yandex expected mixed readiness. Recovery for a 50-megawatt site after fire will depend on electrical damage, water exposure and air handling, not only on servers.
