Drone Strike Shuts Yandex Data Center; Ukraine Hits Salavat Refinery
Yandex says a drone fire took its Sasovo data center fully offline; Kyiv has not claimed it, but its General Staff confirmed a strike on a Bashkir refinery.
SASOVO, Russia — A drone attack set fire to a Yandex data center in Russia’s Ryazan region overnight on October 8 and forced the facility to stop operating entirely, the company said. AFP described it as the first strike of its kind on Russia.
What Yandex and Russian officials said
“A drone attack caused a fire at the Yandex data centre in Sasovo, affecting part of its infrastructure,” a Yandex spokesperson told AFP, as reported by France 24. “There are no casualties, and emergency services are on site dealing with the aftermath. The data centre has stopped operating entirely, and some Yandex services may be unavailable to users.” The company did not say where the drone came from. It told CNBC that its core services were unaffected.
Ryazan Governor Pavel Malkov said two Ukrainian drones were shot down over the region overnight and that “the roof of a business caught fire” in the Sasovo area. Users reported problems reaching Yandex Disk and Yandex Documents, the Kyiv Post reported.
Sasovo lies about 300 kilometers east of Moscow. The data center opened in 2011, and local officials said in 2022 that Yandex had invested more than 6 billion rubles in it over 11 years. Ukrainian monitoring channels cited by the Kyiv Post said the site sits on the grounds of the Sasta plant, which makes metalworking machinery and supplies Russian defense companies. Peter’s World could not independently confirm that link.
Who is responsible
Kyiv has not formally claimed the strike. Andriy Kovalenko, former head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, wrote on Telegram: “Two can play at this game. Ukrainian forces struck a Yandex data centre in the Ryazan region.”
The attack followed a Russian strike on the Datagroup data center in Kyiv in late September. Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that facility processed and transmitted intelligence data for the Ukrainian military, the Kyiv Post reported.
Refinery also hit
Ukraine’s General Staff said its forces struck the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat refinery and petrochemical complex in Bashkortostan overnight, starting a fire, France 24 reported. The plant can process up to 10 million tons of hydrocarbon feedstock a year. It has been hit before, including a July 14 strike that forced a complete halt to oil processing, according to the Kyiv Post.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he approved a plan for long-range strikes on Russia in October and that Ukraine would answer attacks on its civilian infrastructure by hitting corresponding Russian facilities. Speaking at the UN General Assembly on September 23, he warned Russia: “Ukrainians understand that this winter could be very harsh for us. But in response, we will have no choice but to make it painful for Russia too.”
Russian strikes on Ukraine’s power grid continued the same day, forcing emergency power cuts in Kyiv, CNBC reported.
What it means
Analysis: Yandex is Russia’s largest technology company. It runs the country’s most popular search engine along with ride-hailing, food-ordering and cloud services, so an outage at one of its data centers reaches far beyond the military. If Ukraine was responsible, the strike widens its target list from oil, logistics and defense plants to digital infrastructure, matching the kind of target Russia hit in Kyiv last month.
Sources
- France 24: Dozens killed in Kramatorsk as Kyiv targets data centre
- CNBC: Yandex halts operations at data center after drone strike
- Kyiv Post: Ukraine strikes Yandex data center, Russian oil refinery
