From October 8 to October 11, Ukrainian drones attacked three Yandex data centers, causing interruptions in the operation of its services. The industry sought protection from such attacks in advance: since the end of summer, demand for mobile data centers has been growing.
“The news background is favorable for new sales,” says a BBC source in this market, “even too much.”
“One of the main tasks now is how to move computing power, move the entire IT payload from Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Moscow region somewhere further,” Deputy Head of the Ministry of Digital Development Evgeniy Filatov said on October 6 at the Digital Solutions forum.
It is necessary to move power “due to security issues,” the official explained to the audience. Filatov was afraid of attacks on Russian data centers and called one of the key tasks the distribution of capacity between sites in different regions - “somewhere beyond the Urals, where, fortunately, it does not fly.” Two thirds of Russian data centers are now located in the Moscow region and St. Petersburg.
By that time, Russian troops had already attacked data centers in Ukraine. From September 23 to 28, they damaged at least six such objects. The attacks left people without internet and interrupted television broadcasts. Back on October 4, two days before Filatov’s speech, Vladimir Zelensky warned about retaliatory strikes: “Do they really think that we will not respond?”
On the night of October 8, Ukrainian drones attacked the Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region. The 12 megawatt site housed thousands of servers. By four in the morning on October 8, the IODA monitoring system at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States stopped receiving feedback from a third of the previously accessible sections of the Yandex Cloud network, the BBC found out.
On October 9, Ukrainian UAVs attacked the company’s data center in Kaluga. “Several modules of the data center are completely out of order. Because of this, some of Yandex’s services may work intermittently,” the company reported.
Information about “completely disabled” modules does not mean that the servers located in them were destroyed, a BBC source familiar with the structure of the Yandex infrastructure said then. According to him, such a formulation can describe very different types of damage: from a fire in which all equipment burned down, to a hole in the roof, due to which it is not possible to maintain the required air pressure in the room.
Yandex prepared in advance for the equipment shutdown. As the BBC wrote, citing a source in the company, they regularly practiced selective shutdowns of one of the data centers - Yandex has six of them in total. During the exercise, traffic was redirected through other data centers.
But on October 11, when Ukrainian drones attacked the third Yandex data center - in Vladimir - switching to the surviving data centers did not work immediately. From early morning on the website “Sboy.rf” there were complaints not only about the services of the IT giant itself (“Yandex Go”, “Yandex Food” and “Kinopoisk”), but also about third-party companies (“Vkusno i tochka”, “M-Video” and “Pyaterochka”). Yandex announced the partial restoration of services only at five o’clock in the afternoon.
According to a BBC interlocutor familiar with the Yandex infrastructure, most of the company’s services “lived” in the three attacked centers. At the same time, the data center in Vladimir, says a BBC source, formally consisted of two buildings: “Everything is independent [of each other]; it was believed that it was impossible for two “Vladimirs” to “fall out” at the same time.” One service could simultaneously “live” in two “Vladimirs” and consider itself “reserved” in the event of a shutdown of one of the two sites.
When asked by the BBC how many buildings burned down in Vladimir, Yandex did not answer.
One of the three Yandex supercomputers, Galushkin, was installed in Vladimir. Two more - "Chervonenkis" and "Lyapunov" - were located in Sasovo. “Chervonenkis” was among the hundred most powerful supercomputers in the world for a long time and only in 2026 moved to 101st place. By the evening of October 11, it was unknown whether these vehicles had survived.
If supercomputers are damaged, it will not be easy to restore the loss - they ran on chips from the American company Nvidia, which Yandex imported “using complex and intricate schemes” due to sanctions, a former company employee tells the BBC. Due to the current shortage of Nvidia chips associated with the hype around AI, Yandex data centers can only resume work by 2028, according to specialized media.
The industry has been talking about the inevitability of attacks on Russian data centers since the end of summer, says a BBC source in the telecom market. Data centers are a very good target, says another BBC industry source. “They are large, burn well and rarely fall into the air defense zone,” explains the BBC’s interlocutor.
After the first attack, Yandex turned to its partners with a request to “dedicate additional teams of specialists, flexible financial conditions and simplify connection” so that clients could transfer their infrastructure “without unnecessary bureaucracy.” The company hoped that “this will reduce service disruptions” and restore their availability to users. After the third attack on its data centers, Yandex limited some of the functions of the Yandex Disk cloud storage.
Even before the October strikes, demand in Russia for mobile data centers (DPCs)—turnkey mobile storage facilities with “fault-tolerant infrastructure” and “redundant power supply”—had grown in Russia. According to a BBC market source, since the end of summer they have been actively purchased by IT companies and mobile operators, and now they have been joined by “medium and large businesses that need more power than a standard PC.”
Among the suppliers of such ready-made complexes, BBC interlocutors name the Rostelecom subsidiary RTK-DPC, as well as Yadro, part of X Holding, associated with Boris Korolev, the son of the deputy head of the Economic Security Service (SEB) of the FSB, Boris Korolev.
RTK-DPC presented its mobile storage in the summer of 2025. “The customer installs ready-made infrastructure complexes directly on its territory and, if necessary, easily scales them up. The solution allows companies to quickly create their own IT environments without the need to build stationary facilities, and provides reliable, secure storage and processing of large volumes of data,” Rostelecom’s subsidiary praised the storage.
Yadro showed its Borey container data center at the beginning of October 2026 at the Digital Solutions forum. They started selling data centers a few months earlier. “In the context of growing external risks and requirements for the continuity of operation of IT systems, geo-reservation is becoming a separate scenario - the physical separation of the main and backup infrastructure,” says the product description. Production and completion of the data center takes from 8 to 10 weeks and depends on the “selected” design.
“The news background is favorable for new sales, even too favorable,” says a BBC source at the market.
According to open procurement analyzed by the BBC, a mobile data center with engineering equipment, but without servers, is estimated at 18–25 million rubles, and with servers the cost can reach hundreds of millions.
On October 9, the day after the attack on Sasovo, Sberbank’s construction subsidiary Smart Construction announced a request for proposals for a modular data center near the village of Dubrovskoye in the Istra district of the Moscow region. The purchase was planned long before the attacks. The terms of reference are issued under a non-disclosure agreement; the module must be ready by July 29, 2027.
Back in June, the Wildberries marketplace was looking for a contractor to build a foundation for a modular data center with a substation and diesel generators at a warehouse in Koledino, Moscow Region. The warehouse itself was attacked twice by Ukrainian drones over the summer; on the night of August 16, it caught fire after being hit by a drone. What happened to the data center site is unknown.
Russian companies also began ordering protection of existing sites long before the attacks on Yandex. The purchase of VK in March-April 2026 included a metal frame and mesh for seven diesel generators, a gas station and a data center substation for 7.3 million rubles. On September 29, MegaFon announced two tenders for the design and installation of “temporary protective and enclosing structures to protect against UAV attacks” at its facilities across the country.
Back in January, Atomdata-Center of the Rosatom state corporation requested prices for a drone detector for the Kalininsky data center in the Tver region; the state company calls it “one of the largest and most secure data centers in Russia.” And on September 29, Rosatom announced the purchase of shelters for employees of the St. Petersburg data center Xelent and Kalininsky, as well as a project to protect the latter’s equipment.
