Ukrainian drones reportedly hit Yandex's largest Russian data center, cutting power to a cloud zone

Drones struck an industrial site in Sasovo, in Russia's Ryazan region, overnight and started a large fire, the Kyiv Independent reported. Two open-source monitoring groups, Exilenova+ and ASTRA, identified the site as Yandex's Sasovo data center, which the company describes as its largest. The facility sits on the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant. Sasta makes computer-controlled metal-cutting machines used across Russian industry, including in defense, aerospace, and oil and gas. One open-source analyst account claimed on X that the data center has more than 35 megawatts of capacity and held nearly 2,700 Nvidia A100 processors imported before sanctions. That figure has not been independently confirmed.

Yandex later confirmed in an official statement that the drone strike caused the fire, CNBC reported, and that the company fully suspended operations at the site rather than the limited, unattributed "incident" in one cloud zone it had described overnight, Meduza reported. TASS reported that no one was injured and that specialists were on site addressing the aftermath. The outage-tracking service Downdetector logged more than 1,300 user reports of disruption to Yandex Cloud, Yandex Documents and Yandex Tables, while Yandex's search and taxi services kept operating normally. After the strike, Yandex blurred the locations of four Yandex Cloud data centers, including Sasovo, Mytishchi, Kaluga and Vladimir, on its own maps service, United24 Media reported. A dispatch carried by France24 described the strike as the first such attack on Russian data infrastructure since the war began. That characterization has not been independently verified beyond the attribution.

Other attacks followed. In Salavat, in Bashkortostan, residents reported several explosions and then a fire after a drone alert was declared around 4:30 a.m., the independent Russian channel Ostorozhno Novosti reported. It said there was no official information yet.

Russia is also striking Ukrainian cities far from the front. A Russian drone hit a high-rise residential building in Kyiv and injured four people, including two children, Ukrinform reported. TASS quoted what it described as a pro-Russian underground group, which claimed that the destruction of bridges in Kyiv is disrupting the movement of Ukrainian security forces and equipment. Claims made during the war by any side, especially about damage and military effect, are the least reliable category of information and could not be verified.