VLADIMIR, Russia — A Ukrainian drone attack on Sunday shut down a data centre run by Russian technology giant Yandex in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow — the third Yandex data centre strike in four days as Kyiv widens its campaign against infrastructure deep inside Russia.
FAKTA: Yandex data centre strike in Vladimir
- What: Drone attack on a Yandex data centre in Vladimir, east of Moscow; operations completely halted
- When: Sunday, October 11, 2026
- Casualties: None reported; Yandex said no one was injured
- Impact: Outages across Yandex services — taxis, banking, search and delivery — in dozens of Russian cities and in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, according to the independent Russian outlet Astra
- Sequence: Third Yandex data centre strike in four days, after Sasovo (Thursday) and Kaluga (Friday)
Operations completely halted
“As a result of the drone attack, the infrastructure of Yandex’s data center in Vladimir was damaged. Operations at the data center have been completely halted. There were no injuries,” the Yandex Cloud Telegram channel said in a service alert on Sunday.
The company warned that its remaining resource configuration was unstable and advised users to activate disaster-recovery plans, adding that technical support communications could also be disrupted while teams assessed the damage.
In Moscow, residents described disruption to everyday tasks. Pavel Belyavskiy, a driver for Yandex Taxi, said it was unclear whether ride orders were coming through at all. Igor Mann said the Yandex Market shopping platform was unavailable, and another resident, Eduard Malyavko, said the outages had “direct impact” and affected “healthcare, and everything else.”
Third strike in four days
On Thursday, a drone attack took a Yandex data centre offline in the Ryazan region, southeast of Moscow, causing a fire. The Sasovo facility houses two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company’s artificial intelligence model. A day later, Ukrainian drones hit the company’s major data centre in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, partly putting it out of action, Yandex said.
Yandex, often described as Russia’s Google, runs the country’s most popular search engine and a wide range of digital services. It is heavily involved in Russia’s artificial intelligence development and is one of the few major Russian companies not under Western sanctions.
A widening infrastructure war
Ukraine’s strikes on data centres follow Russian attacks on data hubs in Ukraine. Russia has struck several Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications infrastructure facilities over the past month, and Ukraine’s digital minister told Reuters last month that the country was moving digital infrastructure underground in response.
“We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday after the first strike. “You all know, they have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres. We are responding.”
The strike came a day after US President Donald Trump said it was time for Ukraine to get a new president and told Kyiv it should stop hitting Russian oil refineries, blaming the refinery campaign for high diesel prices in the United States.
Read more Europe news on the Watan News Europe desk.
