Russia's Yandex says second data centre hit by drone attack in two days

A drone strike overnight into Friday took several modules of a Yandex data centre in Russia's Kaluga region completely offline, the Russian technology company said, warning the outage could disrupt some of its services. Nobody was hurt in the strike, Yandex said.

The facility was the second of the company's data centres to be hit in as many days. A drone struck a separate Yandex site in the Ryazan region on Thursday, home to two of the three supercomputers the company uses to train its AI model; engineers were still trying to establish whether that hardware could be salvaged, Yandex said.

Kaluga regional governor Vladislav Shapsha said nine people were injured in overnight drone strikes across the region, five of whom were hospitalised. Drones struck the regional capital and four municipal districts, he said, adding that private homes were also damaged in two of the districts. Russian air defences intercepted 26 drones over the region, Shapsha said.

In Russia's Tver region, a drone strike set fire to the Redkino Experimental Plant, the region's largest chemical enterprise, regional governor Vitaly Korolev said. The fire was extinguished and employees evacuated to a shelter; no one was injured, he said. The plant has previously produced a fuel component used in Kh-55 and Kh-101 cruise missiles, according to Ukrainian monitoring channels.

Russia's defence ministry said its air defences intercepted 505 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones overnight over 19 Russian regions, occupied Crimea and the Black and Azov seas, including activity over Kaluga, Bryansk, Belgorod, Kursk, Tula, Tver, Smolensk and Moscow regions.

"We always respond in mirror-like fashion," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday, referring to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres. "You all know, they have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres. We are responding. I can't share all the details."