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Morning Edition · Sunday, October 11, 2026Published at 1:17 AM EDT · New York
Drone Strikes Shut a Third Yandex Data Center, Disrupting Russian Taxi, Delivery and Cloud Services
Yandex has added drone and missile attacks to the force majeure clause of its user agreement, and a Russian procurement channel says the company cannot replace damaged servers before 2028 because of a global memory shortage.
Yandex's data center in Vladimir stopped working on Sunday, the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported, after drones struck infrastructure in the city's suburbs. The independent Russian channel Ostorozhno Novosti said that Yandex apps were still failing about an hour and a half later. Readers reported that they could not order taxis or deliveries in Russia or in other countries where Yandex operates.
The Kyiv Independent says this is the third Yandex data center shut down after a reported drone attack. On Oct. 8 a strike completely halted the company's data center in Sasovo, in Ryazan region, and outages spread to banks and large websites that run on Yandex Cloud. On Oct. 10 Yandex updated its user agreement to list drone and missile attacks as force majeure, a clause that can exempt a company from contractual obligations to customers in the event of circumstances beyond its control.
Replacing the equipment may take years. The Telegram channel Bankrollo, citing the channel Vremya Goszakupok, wrote that Yandex will not be able to restore its damaged data centers until at least 2028. According to that report, the delay owes less to Western sanctions than to a global shortage of high-bandwidth memory and accelerator chips for new servers.
Russian lawmakers are already responding. A member of the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, proposed classifying the locations of data centers after the Ryazan strike.
Part of a tracked trend
The War Reaches Russia's Interior
The Ukraine war increasingly manifests inside Russia through drone strikes and attacks on soft targets far from the front, steadily raising the country's domestic risk premium and internal-security costs.
Veracity: Corroborated
80/100- If true, who benefits
If the framing holds, Kyiv gains a set of targets that Russia cannot rebuild quickly. Russian security agencies gain a case for classifying and guarding data centers. Yandex's force majeure change moves the cost of outages onto its business customers.
- The nuance
Russian state news agency TASS and the Kyiv Independent both confirm the Vladimir shutdown. The story leaves out the Oct. 9 strike in Kaluga region, and it leaves out that Zelenskyy described the attacks as a response in kind to Russian strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure. Ukrainian reporting places the Sasovo site in a former machine-tool complex that serves the defense industry. The estimate that repairs will take until 2028 rests only on Telegram channels with no named source.
An open-source-intelligence read of how likely this story is true with its real nuance, not a judgment of any outlet. It assesses the claim, weighing independent and adversarial reporting. How we label confidence.
Synthesized from: RIA Novosti · Kyiv Independent · Polylog editors
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