Yandex confirmed that its data centre located in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow, was struck by a drone, forcing the site to cease operations. The company reported that no injuries occurred during the incident and that emergency responders arrived promptly to secure the area. The shutdown was announced through a service alert posted on the messaging platform Telegram.
Following the impact, Yandex indicated that several of its online services became unavailable to users while technical teams evaluated restoration options. The firm urged customers to implement disaster-recovery procedures, noting that the platform was operating in an emergency mode. It also warned that the remaining resource configuration was unstable, which could affect technical support communications.
The Vladimir incident marks the third assault on Yandex data facilities within a single week, reflecting an intensifying pattern of attacks on technology infrastructure amid the broader Russia-Ukraine confrontation. Both sides have increasingly targeted digital assets, seeking to impair each other's operational capabilities and public services.
Earlier in the week, Yandex reported that a data centre in the Kaluga region, situated southwest of Moscow, suffered damage from Ukrainian drones, leaving part of the facility out of service. The strike disrupted some of the company's computing capacity, prompting Yandex to assess the extent of the damage and initiate contingency measures.
The day before the Kaluga event, a Ukrainian drone attack forced the shutdown of Yandex's hub in Sasovo, southeast of Moscow. That site housed two of the three supercomputers used for training the company's artificial-intelligence models, temporarily halting key AI development activities while engineers worked to restore functionality.
In retaliation, Russian forces have targeted multiple Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications sites over the past month, including installations in central Kyiv. These actions appear aimed at undermining Ukraine's digital commerce and communications networks, further escalating the cyber-physical dimension of the ongoing conflict.