Yandex Data Centre Shut After Third Drone Strike in a Week

A Yandex data centre in Vladimir, east of Moscow, has been shut down after a drone attack. Yandex announced the shutdown on Sunday, Al Jazeera reported. No injuries were reported.

In a Telegram alert, the company said operations at the site were “completely suspended.” It told customers to activate disaster-recovery plans. Yandex said its platform was running in emergency mode.

A third strike on Yandex in one week

This is the third attack on Yandex data centres in a week. On 8 October, a Ukrainian attack shut the Sasovo hub, southeast of Moscow. That site houses two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company’s AI model.

On 9 October, drones struck a data centre in the Kaluga region and put it partly out of action. Yandex called its remaining resources “unstable” after the latest strike. Several services were unavailable to users.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke after the Sasovo attack. He said Ukraine responds in kind, and that he could not share all the details. Al Jazeera’s report carried no statement from the Russian government on the strikes.

Why Yandex data centre attacks matter

Data centres are now part of the battlefield. They hold the cloud services that businesses and public bodies use every day. They also hold the computing power for AI training.

Russia has hit Ukrainian data centres and telecom facilities over the past month too, Al Jazeera reported. That includes sites in central Kyiv. The aim appears to be to disrupt connectivity and digital commerce.

Civilians feel the effects first. Banking, delivery apps and public services can all slow down when computing capacity disappears. That is the practical cost of a war that now reaches into server halls.

The strikes also show how fragile the AI supply chain has become. A model needs power, chips and secure buildings. Remove one of the three and the project stalls. Governments and companies will study this week closely.

For another look at attacks on civilian infrastructure, read our report on the Kyiv power grid attack.

Fact basis: Al Jazeera (11 October 2026), Cybernews, Kyiv Post and AI Weekly alerts. The effect on Yandex AI development has not been independently confirmed.