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A drone attack on Sunday forced Russian technology giant Yandex to completely shut down its data center in Vladimir, east of Moscow, the company said, disrupting taxi, cloud, and other services in Russia and abroad.
"As a result of a UAV attack, infrastructure at the Yandex data center in Vladimir was damaged," the company said in a service alert on Telegram. "Operations at the data center have been completely suspended."
It was the third reported strike on Yandex data centers in a week, following attacks in the Ryazan and Kaluga regions, and could signal a Ukrainian campaign against Russia’s internet infrastructure after Moscow began hitting data centers in Ukraine.
No one was injured, Yandex said, adding that emergency services were on site.
"The remaining resource configuration is considered unstable," the company said, warning that the platform was operating in emergency mode and advising users to activate disaster-recovery plans.
Earlier Sunday, Yandex Cloud reported power interruptions in its "ru-central1-a" availability zone, which is located at the Vladimir data center, the Kyiv Independent reported.
Vladimir Governor Alexander Avdeev wrote on Telegram that the power supply, locally interrupted by the drone attack, had been 80% restored and heat and water supply fully restored.
Yandex Go users were unable to order taxis in cities including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Perm, Krasnoyarsk and Vladivostok, as well as in Serbia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, according to Russian independent outlet Ostorozhno Novosti.
Services including Yandex Music, the Telemost video platform, Yandex’s smart home services and the full Yandex Cloud infrastructure were also disrupted, Russian media reported.
A drone attack on Oct. 8 sparked a fire at Yandex’s data center in Sasovo in the Ryazan region, forcing a full suspension of operations. On Oct. 9, a strike damaged its data center in Kaluga, disabling several modules.
On Oct. 10, Yandex updated its user agreement to list drone and missile attacks as force majeure circumstances.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Oct. 8 that Ukraine was responding to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers.
"We always respond in kind," he said, adding that Russia "has been and still is striking our data centers."
Ukraine has not commented on the Vladimir attack.
Yandex, often dubbed “Russia’s Google,” runs the country’s most popular search engine and taxi and food-ordering apps used by tens of millions, as its Yandex data center network comes under repeated attack.
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