First UAV attack on Yandex. Activities stopped in the data center

A large data center belonging to Yandex, Russia's leading technology and artificial intelligence company, was the target of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

According to the Reuters agency, the company announced that it completely stopped the activities in the data center when a fire broke out as a result of the attack on the facility located in the Ryazan region, southeast of the capital Moscow.

The development in question is the first confirmed major UAV attack against a major data center in Russia.

In the images published on social media and not yet confirmed by independent sources, dense black smoke was seen rising from the roof of the building.

The Downdetector Russia platform, which monitors internet outages, recorded a significant increase in user complaints since the early hours of Thursday.

Andriy Kovalenko, President of the Ukrainian Center for Combating Disinformation, announced in his post on his Telegram account that the Kiev administration was behind the attack.

Sharing a photo claimed to be from the moment of the attack, Kovalenko said, "Two people can play this game. Ukrainian forces hit the Yandex data center in the Ryazan region."

Ryazan Regional Governor Pavel Malkov announced that two Ukrainian UAVs were shot down over the region at night and that "a fire broke out on the roof of a business" in the Sasovo region.

The city of Sasovo, where the data center is located, is located approximately 300 kilometers east of Moscow.

Speaking to AFP, a Yandex spokesman stated that a fire broke out in the data center in Sasovo due to the UAV attack and part of the infrastructure was damaged.

The spokesperson, who did not give details about the origin of the UAVs, said, "There is no loss of life; emergency teams are working at the scene to resolve the consequences. The data center has completely stopped its operations and some Yandex services may be temporarily inaccessible for users."

Yandex, which reaches tens of millions of people in the Russian-speaking region with its search engine as well as food ordering and taxi-hailing applications, reported that its basic consumer services were not affected by the incident.

The company, which includes YandexGPT, one of the country's leading productive artificial intelligence models, made an announcement through its corporate cloud service Yandex Cloud, stating that there were electricity supply problems in a central area and advised customers to use other access areas.

The UAV attack in question followed Russia's intense air strikes on data centers and logistics warehouses in Ukraine in recent weeks.

Following the military operation launched by Moscow in February 2022, both sides have significantly increased mutual long-range air strikes in recent months.