A Ukrainian drone strike hit a Yandex data center in Vladimir, Russia, early Sunday, October 11, forcing the 40-to-50-megawatt facility to suspend operations and disrupting more than 80 digital services, according to the Kyiv Post and the Telegram channels ASTRA and Crimean Wind. It is the third attack on Yandex server hubs in four days, after earlier strikes in the Ryazan and Kaluga regions.
The Vladimir site, designed for up to 2,880 server racks, is one of the company's foundational processing hubs. The outage spread well beyond Yandex: users reported failures in banking apps, ride-hailing platforms and major retail chains, including Magnit and Fix Price. The repeated hits contributed to a roughly 4 percent drop in Yandex shares on the Moscow Exchange earlier in the week.
What went down: Yandex Cloud, YandexGPT and consumer apps
Yandex confirmed the Vladimir data center stopped operations. The disruption hit enterprise systems hosted on Yandex Cloud, with outages across computing, storage, database management and development pipelines. Affected services included Compute Cloud, Object Storage, Managed Kubernetes, PostgreSQL and ClickHouse databases.
On the AI side, interfaces such as the YandexGPT API, SpeechKit and Vision OCR were also reported down. Consumer apps including the Alice voice assistant, Yandex Music, the Telemost videoconferencing tool and Yandex Smart Home were affected too. The outages extended to third-party commercial platforms in Russia and neighboring countries, a reminder of how concentrated cloud infrastructure can be.
Three strikes in four days: Vladimir, Ryazan and Kaluga
The campaign against Yandex infrastructure began on Thursday, October 8, when strike drones hit a Yandex data center in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, igniting a fire and forcing a full shutdown. That attack disabled server infrastructure used by Russian Railways (RZhD), mobile operator MegaFon and several national media outlets.
