Yandex data centre in Vladimir shut after drone strike, company says

Russian technology company Yandex said its data centre in Vladimir, east of Moscow, stopped operating after a drone attack on Sunday 11 October. The company reported no injuries. The Independent and Novaya Gazeta Europe carried Yandex's account of the shutdown, the third such incident at its facilities in four days. The facility, in Vladimir's Energetik district, is a 40-to-50-megawatt site designed to house up to 2,880 server racks, according to Kyiv Post.

Vladimir regional governor Aleksandr Avdeev said the attack on infrastructure outside the city caused a fire and disrupted electricity supplies, according to Novaya Gazeta Europe. Two substations stopped working, leaving thousands of residents without power. People living near the site were evacuated. Avdeev said no residential buildings had been destroyed; readers of Novaya Gazeta Europe reported heavy smoke over the city's Leninsky district.

Power restoration began later on Sunday. Kyiv Post reported that the governor said heat, water and roughly 80% of electricity supply had been restored in affected parts of Vladimir by Sunday morning. Interfax separately reported partial power restoration and said Rosselkhoznadzor, Russia's agricultural safety watchdog, had switched its veterinary-document and pesticide-tracking systems to emergency mode because of the outage. Yandex gave no timeline for repairing its equipment.

By Sunday evening, Ukrainian outlet NV reported that the disruption had spread to six countries and had also affected two Russian state digital systems, widening earlier reports of problems in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Serbia. Novaya Gazeta Europe said people in Moscow, St Petersburg, Perm, Krasnoyarsk, Vladivostok and other Russian cities had been unable to book Yandex taxis, with drivers reporting log-in failures and passengers shown no available cars.

Kyiv Post reported disruption to Yandex's Alice voice assistant, Yandex Music, its video-conferencing tool and smart-home service, along with computing and database functions used by business customers, including banking and retail platforms such as Magnit and Fix Price. It said more than 80 services and cloud components were affected, a figure from the report that ECTV has not independently verified. Yandex shares fell by about 4% on the Moscow Exchange this week as the strikes continued, Kyiv Post reported.

The Independent reported earlier shutdowns at Yandex facilities in Ryazan region on Thursday 8 October and in Kaluga on Friday 9 October. The Ryazan strike disabled infrastructure used by Russian Railways and mobile operator MegaFon and knocked several Russian media websites offline, according to Kyiv Post. Yandex said the Kaluga attack had partly interrupted its operations. On 10 October, Yandex updated its user agreement to list drone and missile attacks as force majeure events that could exempt it from contractual obligations, Kyiv Post reported. Each incident is separate from the Vladimir damage and disruption figures given here.

Several outlets described the Vladimir strike as Ukrainian, but Yandex's own statement confirmed only that a drone attack had occurred. No independent technical attribution confirming who launched the drone is contained in the material available to ECTV.