A third Yandex data center goes dark after a drone strike, as the war reaches Russia's AI computers

Russia's biggest tech and AI company said a drone attack on Sunday, Oct. 11, 2026, damaged its data center in the Vladimir region east of Moscow and forced a complete shutdown, knocking some of its services offline. It follows Thursday's strike that shut Yandex's Sasovo hub and Friday's strike that partly disabled its Kaluga center. Russia has been hitting Ukrainian data centers for weeks; Ukraine's president calls the strikes on Yandex a mirror-image response.

For years, "AI infrastructure is critical infrastructure" was a line in policy decks. This week it turned into a target list. Data centers are huge, power-hungry and impossible to hide, and when one goes down it takes more than a chatbot with it: taxis, bank apps and every small company whose backups lived in the same cloud. Russia already struggles to import advanced AI chips because of sanctions, so compute it loses is compute it can't easily replace, and Yandex is the company it leans on most for homegrown AI. The bigger lesson isn't only about Russia. Every country racing to build giant AI campuses is building the same kind of target, which is why Ukraine is already moving its servers underground.

Yandex said on Sunday, Oct. 11, 2026, that a drone attack had damaged the infrastructure of its data center in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow, and that operations there were “completely suspended.” A data center is a building full of servers, the computers that run websites, apps, and AI models. No one was injured, the company said, but some Yandex services were unavailable to users. Those lines are Yandex’s, as Reuters reports them.

In a service alert on its Yandex Cloud Telegram channel, the company said the platform was running in emergency mode, called its remaining resource configuration “unstable,” and advised customers to activate their disaster-recovery plans. Disaster-recovery, here, means the backup steps a customer takes when the main computers go down. Those lines are Yandex’s, as Al Jazeera reports them from the alert.

The Associated Press, citing the Russian independent outlet Astra, reported that the outage left users in dozens of Russian cities, and in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, unable to order taxis or use banking services. Those lines are the Associated Press’s account of Astra.

It is the third Yandex data center put out of action since Thursday. On Thursday, Oct. 8, a drone strike caused a fire at Yandex’s Sasovo hub in the Ryazan region, southeast of Moscow, and forced it to suspend operations at the site, which holds tens of thousands of servers. Reuters called it the first major attack on a Russian data hub since the war began. Those lines are Reuters’.

On Friday, Oct. 9, drones partly disabled Yandex’s data center in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow. Ukrainian arms maker Firepoint said its FP-1 one-way attack drones were used. A one-way attack drone is a flying weapon that is not meant to come back. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy confirmed the Kaluga strike, calling it “our tit-for-tat response.” Those lines are Reuters’.

Yandex said in 2021 that the Sasovo hub hosted two of its three supercomputers built around Nvidia A100 chips, which it uses to train its YandexGPT large language model. A supercomputer, here, is a warehouse of chips that trains an AI model. A large language model is software that writes and answers in everyday language. Yandex has declined to say whether those supercomputers were affected. Those lines are Reuters’, citing Yandex.

Yandex operates five large data centers, according to Reuters. After Friday’s strike it said it had struck a deal with other cloud providers so clients could quickly move their data and services, and its shares fell more than 4% on the Moscow Exchange. Those lines are Reuters’.

Russia has struck Ukrainian data centers and telecommunications infrastructure over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv. “We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” Zelenskiy said on Thursday. Ukraine’s digital minister told Reuters last month that the country was moving digital infrastructure underground. Those lines are Reuters’.

Yandex, often called “Russia’s Google,” runs YandexGPT, the Alice voice assistant, Yandex Cloud, Yandex Taxi and Yandex Music, and is one of the few major Russian companies not under Western sanctions. Its main domestic rival, Sberbank, has said Russian AI developers trail their US and Chinese counterparts by six to nine months, with sanctions on advanced chips the main bottleneck. Sanctions, here, are Western rules that block Russia from buying the newest chips. Those lines are Reuters’.

In plain terms, a drone strike on Sunday shut Yandex’s Vladimir data center, the third of its five big server hubs hit since Thursday. The Thursday target, Sasovo, is where Yandex has said two of its three YandexGPT training supercomputers sit. Some taxi and banking apps went dark as far as Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Armenia. Ukraine’s president calls the strikes a mirror of Russia’s hits on Ukrainian data centers. Yandex has not said whether the training machines were damaged.