Ukraine strikes shut Yandex data centers, disrupting Russian AI and cloud services
Ukraine launched its third drone attack on Yandex in a matter of days on Sunday morning, October 11, causing the complete shutdown of the company's data center in the Vladimir region, according to Reuters and the Kyiv Post as reported by Gizmodo. The strikes followed attacks on another data center facility in Kaluga and one in Sasovo near Moscow, which Reuters describes as housing two of the three supercomputers used to develop Yandex's AI model. Yandex's Alice voice assistant, Yandex Music and its Telemost video-conferencing service were reportedly down, while Yandex Compute Cloud saw what the Kyiv Post called extensive outages; users also reported banking and rideshare app failures, with retail apps such as Magnit and Fix Price affected. Because Yandex's data centers underpin other services, including healthcare-related cloud offerings, the outage's impact was described as widely dispersed.
For one of Russia's largest providers of cloud and AI infrastructure, such strikes can directly set back model-training capacity and disrupt downstream services that depend on its cloud.
The big story out of the Ukraine War for 2026 has been Ukraine’s ability to strike oil infrastructure deep inside Russia. These are new capabilities that stem from the maturing of specialist divisions in the Ukrainian military like its 1st Separate Center of Unmanned Systems. With purpose-built fixed-wing drones like the AN-196 RS and FP-6—basically just exploding airplanes—Ukraine has spent this year turning up the volume on this war for Russia and the wider world through the power of blowing important things up.
But it’s not just oil. Today, a big chunk of Russia’s cloud and AI infrastructure has been blown up. Services are disrupted, or completely shut down.
Over the past few days, one of the focal points for Ukraine’s onslaught has been Yandex, a company the New York Times once called, “a version of Google, Amazon and Uber rolled into one.” As explained by Reuters, the third attack on Yandex, which occurred Sunday morning, was pretty devastating, “resulting in the complete shutdown of its data centre in the Vladimir region.”
Per Reuters, this comes within days of attacks on another data center facility in Kalugg, and one in Sasovo near Moscow, where it sounds like Yandex performs most of its training runs. (Reuters describes it as “where two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company’s AI model are housed.”)
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