Yandex Shuts Down Vladimir Data Centre Following Ukrainian Drone Strike

A Russian data centre operated by technology and AI company Yandex has been completely shut down after being struck in a drone attack. The incident at the facility in the city of Vladimir, located east of Moscow, resulted in no reported injuries, according to the company.

Emergency services responded to the scene, and several Yandex services experienced outages as teams worked to evaluate and restore system functionality. In a service alert posted on Telegram, Yandex announced that operations were fully suspended, urging users to activate disaster-recovery plans while the platform runs in emergency mode.

The company warned that remaining resource configurations are unstable and that technical support communications might be disrupted during damage assessments. This marks the third attack on Yandex data centres within the span of a week, highlighting an escalation in targeted strikes against technology infrastructure between Russia and Ukraine.

On Friday, Yandex—often described as "Russia’s Google" and heavily involved in domestic AI development—reported that its facility in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow was struck by Ukrainian drones and partially disabled. A day prior, another strike shut down the company's data hub in Sasovo, which houses two of the three supercomputers used to develop Yandex's AI model.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the strikes on Thursday, stating that Ukraine responds in a mirror-like fashion to Russian attacks on its own data centres and digital infrastructure.