Russia's Yandex suspended operations at a major cloud campus in Sasovo, Ryazan region, on Thursday after drones struck the site and started a fire, the company told investors and users — one of the first confirmed attacks on a Russian hyperscale data hub since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
Yandex said emergency crews were on site, that there were no casualties, and that it was shifting workloads to other availability zones while assessing damage. The firm warned that some consumer and business services tied to the affected zone could be unavailable even as core platforms kept running.
What Yandex reported
In statements carried by CNBC and Reuters, Yandex described the Sasovo facility as part of its Yandex Cloud footprint. The company said the strike damaged infrastructure at the campus and forced a complete halt to operations there while specialists worked to restore power and networking.
Yandex runs one of Russia's largest consumer internet stacks — search, maps, ride-hailing and YandexGPT — and has pitched its cloud division as domestic alternative capacity as Western vendors exited the market. A prolonged outage at a primary zone raises questions about redundancy planning inside Russia's sanctioned tech sector, even when traffic is rerouted.
Overnight air-defense tally
Russia's Defense Ministry said air defenses intercepted 399 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning Moscow time, naming more than a dozen regions from Belgorod to Bashkortostan. State news agency TASS quoted Yandex confirming fire damage at Sasovo and noting cleanup by special services.
Ukrainian officials did not immediately claim the Sasovo strike in public statements reviewed by international outlets on Thursday. Kyiv has nonetheless advertised a widening campaign against Russian logistics, refineries and, in recent weeks, data and warehouse targets it links to the war economy.
Context on infrastructure targeting
Western analysts have tracked reciprocal long-range strikes as both sides hit energy, ports and digital assets far from the front. AFP described the Yandex hit as the first major confirmed drone attack on a Russian data centre, following reported Russian strikes on Ukrainian data facilities in prior weeks.
For cloud customers, Yandex's status page advised using alternate zones where possible. Investors will watch whether insurance and spare capacity can absorb the loss without broader service degradation — and whether Ukrainian planners treat Russian tech campuses as repeat targets.
What happens next
Moscow is likely to pair public damage control with another night of mass drone interceptions, while Yandex engineers race to rebuild networking at Sasovo. Ukraine's general staff may comment later if it attributes the raid; until then, the episode marks a new category in the infrastructure war — not oil tanks or substations, but the racks that host Russia's domestic internet economy.