Yandex reported a large-scale outage due to a drone strike. This is the first attack by the Ukrainian Armed Forces on a Russian data center

On the night of Thursday, October 8, a large-scale failure occurred in the work of Yandex services - some of them were unavailable. The company reported that as a result of an attack by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the Ryazan region, a fire occurred in the data center.

“In the Yandex data center in Sasovo, as a result of a UAV attack, a fire occurred that affected part of the infrastructure. There were no injuries, specialized services are on the spot eliminating the consequences,” they said.

Some Yandex services stopped working after midnight

At 1:31 Moscow time, the Yandex.Cloud portal reported power outages in the ru-central1-b availability zone and called for, if possible, to transfer the load to other availability zones. Three hours later, the company clarified that problems may arise when creating new virtual machines, k8s clusters and databases.

The last message on the portal was published at 8:26.

The Yandex press service, meanwhile, said that the work of the data center has completely stopped and some services may be unavailable to users.

Against the backdrop of what happened, according to Interfax, Yandex shares fell in price by 2.8 percent at Moscow Exchange trading.

Two drones were shot down at night in the Ryazan region

Governor of the Ryazan region Pavel Malkov reported that on the night of October 8, two drones were shot down over the territory of the Ryazan region. “In the Sasovo district, the roof of one of the enterprises caught fire, glass was broken in several private sector houses. Preliminarily, there were no casualties. Operational services are working on the spot,” he wrote on Telegram.

This is the first attack by the Ukrainian Armed Forces on a Russian data center

The attack on the Yandex data center was the first since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The Telegram channel “Two Majors” writes that now Russian data processing centers (DPCs) are under threat. “And they need to be protected if we lay claim to at least nominal digital sovereignty and still want to follow the departing train of a new technological order,” note the authors of the channel. “Well, it’s time for data center owners to understand that their facilities have become a target.”