A drone attack attributed to Ukrainian forces struck a Yandex data centre in Russia's Vladimir region during the night of 11 October. The attack marked the third consecutive episode of this kind directed at the company's infrastructure, following hits recorded across two consecutive days at sites in Sasovo, within the Ryazan region, and in Kaluga on 8 and 9 October — three facilities linked to the network in total coming under drone fire.

Connectivity across the Russian internet was disrupted following each attack. Among the platform's own products knocked offline were Yandex Go, Yandex Eats, and Yandex Pay — tools that a broad segment of the Russian population had come to depend on for everyday tasks. Taxi bookings, digital payments, delivery apps, email access, and the Alice voice assistant all became unavailable to residents during the outage.

Outages were reported simultaneously across a range of other platforms and digital services. Among the affected were financial institutions, retail outlets, online marketplaces, classified listing platforms, and news publishers, along with their associated apps and a range of other services. Yandex's infrastructure served as the data-storage backbone for a group of organisations that included CIAN, Sports.ru, Magnit, and Vkusno i Tochka.

Yandex's data centre infrastructure has drawn consistent interest across the industry. Two revenue streams flow from that infrastructure — powering the company's own platforms while leasing out processing capacity and storage space to outside clients. A large portion of the data-storage sector relies on Yandex's infrastructure, which the company built at a time when aerial drone strikes on such facilities were not part of its planning assumptions.

On 11 October, Yandex revised its terms of service to place strikes involving drones, missiles, and comparable weaponry under the force majeure provision, removing the company from liability for any resulting harm. Drills involving the deliberate offline rotation of individual data centres — one at a time across a pool of six — formed part of the firm's documented operational practice, according to reporting from a broadcast news outlet.

Three data centres came under Ukrainian strike, with the facilities in Sasovo and near Vladimir rendered fully non-operational as a result. Three of Yandex's six data centres — those positioned in the Vladimir region, Ivanteyevka, and Mytishchi, with the latter pair on Moscow's outer edges — remained undamaged through the course of the attacks. Yandex Cloud, the company's cloud storage arm, moved into emergency operating mode following the third recorded hit on its infrastructure.

Eldar Murtazin, lead analyst at Mobile Research Group, told a news outlet that the company had exhausted its available capacity buffer, a development he described as a troubling indicator for the business. Clients were directed by Yandex to establish redundant infrastructure through alternative hosting platforms — among them Selectel, K2Cloud, and VK Cloud — as a contingency measure. Organisations that lacked arrangements for rerouting workloads to alternative infrastructure and retrieving affected data saw their day-to-day functions disrupted for a period.

Three data centres operate under Selectel's management — two of them, located in Moscow and St. Petersburg, run directly by the company, with a third facility in Novosibirsk handled through a partner arrangement. Four availability zones appear in K2Cloud's infrastructure footprint — three positioned across Moscow and a fourth anchored in St. Petersburg. The VK Cloud platform maintains four data-centre zones within Russia and a further two operating out of Kazakhstan, spread across two countries.

During 2024, Yandex brought its own server infrastructure online within Kazakhstan. Under applicable law, firms operating in the country are required to keep designated categories of data on servers located within its borders. Telecom operators are required by the Yarovaya laws to retain a full six months of user traffic data along with three years' worth of metadata, held on servers located within the country's borders, and every company faces a requirement to keep customer data within Russian borders. Data flowing through VK's and Yandex's infrastructure inside Kazakhstan is confined to records tied to users based in that country.

A cyberattack attributed to Iran struck Amazon-operated data centres across the Middle East during the spring of 2026, a period cited here as a point of reference. The company disclosed data loss on 15 September, covering customer records held within a single availability zone in the UAE — identified as mec1-az2 — as well as every availability zone operating across Bahrain, with all of that information described as unrecoverable. Data recovery across two additional UAE availability zones — mec1-az1 and mec1-az3 — had yet to reach completion by that point, roughly half a year after the outages occurred.

Security researchers have noted that data centres share a vulnerability profile with commercial distribution hubs — fixed installations at publicly documented addresses, housing high-value hardware with relatively limited physical defences against aerial threats. Over the preceding month, attacks on comparable infrastructure had been carried out, with the defence ministry's Telegram channel at one point framing the campaign as a "digital detox."

Prior to the first strike on a Yandex data centre, Deputy Digital Development Minister Yevgeny Filatov had put forward a proposal that internet infrastructure be moved deeper into the country — pointing specifically to regions east of the Urals, which had not yet been targeted. At the same time, VK, MegaFon, Rosatom, and other firms were in the process of fitting their facilities with protective frames, netting, and drone-detection systems, and were also establishing dedicated on-site shelters for employees. Shadayev, who heads the Digital Development Ministry, told reporters on 12 October that his department had been coordinating with the Defence Ministry on measures to safeguard data centre infrastructure.

According to an industry contact who spoke with a broadcaster, the pace at which Yandex manages to procure replacement hardware for its affected systems will play a defining role in what comes next. Procurement lead times for this type of equipment are running at up to six months under present conditions.

According to ComNews Group CEO Leonid Konik, a simultaneous outage across all of Yandex's platforms would translate into revenue losses of roughly 4 billion rubles — an amount he described as equivalent to a full day's earnings for the company. Recorded losses are lower than that figure, given that the disruptions affected only portions of the supply rather than the whole. Tallying losses across dozens of further companies pushes the combined daily figure into a range measured in billions of roubles.

Analysts note that sustained attacks on Yandex's remaining infrastructure — or broader operations against other technology firms' facilities — could leave the country's IT sector navigating a lengthy recovery period. Constructing or restoring data centre infrastructure tends to be a drawn-out undertaking that carries considerable cost. Planning infrastructure for aerial-threat resilience involves options including hardened air-defence systems, subsurface sheltering, or a dispersed network of smaller facilities spread across separate sites. Producers of containerised data facilities — modular units built to shipping-container dimensions — stand to gain business as a result, though such deployments are not expected to serve as a wholesale substitute for Yandex's existing data centre infrastructure.