Key points
- Sasovo shut down; Kaluga partly offline
- Yandex has no repair timeline
- Cloud customers faced limits after the first strike
- Zelensky's explanation for the strikes
Drones struck a second Yandex data center in two days on Friday, knocking out part of the Russian internet company's site in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow. The first attack, overnight from October 7 to October 8, seriously damaged Yandex's data center in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, and its operations have stopped completely, Yandex said in a statement on Telegram.
Yandex runs Russia's most-used search engine, with 70% of searches in September, according to StatCounter. The company also runs apps for maps, ride-hailing, food delivery, music, and video, plus a cloud business that rents computing power to other companies.
No employees were hurt at either site, the company said. Emergency crews and Yandex specialists are working at both.
The Sasovo facility houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI model, The Moscow Times reported.
Yandex says it can't yet give a repair timeline
Yandex called the data centers the company's "iron heart," saying millions of people and hundreds of thousands of businesses depend on them.
The company is still assessing the damage. It's "very difficult" to say when the equipment in the data centers will be working again, Yandex said.
After the Sasovo strike, Yandex told cloud customers that "the ability to create new resources in our cloud infrastructure may currently be limited" and advised them to move workloads elsewhere, The Record reported. The company operates five data centers in Russia. Internet monitor NetBlocks said Yandex's network connectivity fell to around 70% of normal levels on Thursday.
Yandex shares were down 4.7% at 3,410 rubles ($40) on the Moscow Exchange as of 8:43 p.m. Moscow time Friday, after falling about 3% on Thursday, exchange data show.
Kyiv calls the strikes a response to attacks on its own data centers
Speaking Thursday, before the Kaluga strike, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described attacks on Russian server facilities as retaliation for Russia's recent missile strikes on server facilities in Kyiv. "We always respond symmetrically," Zelensky told reporters.
Russia began striking Ukrainian data centers in September, saying they supported Ukraine's armed forces. Strikes in late September damaged at least six Ukrainian data centers, and a September 23 attack cut fixed-line internet for about 100,000 households in and around Kyiv.
Kaluga Governor Vladislav Shapsha said nine people were hurt in Friday's drone strikes on the city. Shapsha didn't name the facilities that were hit.
Yandex trades only in Moscow. The company is separate from Nebius Group (NBIS), the Amsterdam-based AI cloud company that sold Yandex's Russian businesses in 2024.
Yandex said keeping its services running is its top priority. "Right now this is our most important task, but unfortunately it is not an easy one," the company said.
Yandex's statement is translated from Russian. Ruble figures are converted at 84.90 rubles to the dollar, the Central Bank of Russia's official rate set for October 10, 2026.
