Drone damage halts Yandex data center in Russia’s Vladimir region

Yandex said a drone attack damaged infrastructure at its data center in Russia’s Vladimir region on Oct. 11, completely halting operations at the facility. The company reported no injuries and said some of its services were unavailable.

The outage also affected Yandex Cloud. In a status update timestamped 10:12 GMT, the company said availability zones ru-central1-a and ru-central1-b remained unavailable and that work to restore services and platform components was continuing around the clock.

Cloud disruption unfolded through the morning

Yandex Cloud’s incident record logged a power disruption in ru-central1-a at 1:11 GMT. At 3:11 GMT, it reported that both zones were unavailable and that the cloud platform was operating in emergency mode. The company advised customers to use alternative disaster-recovery plans.

The 10:12 GMT update said service availability had not changed. Yandex Cloud listed 18:00 Moscow time on Oct. 11, or 15:00 GMT, as the scheduled time for its next update. By 15:11 GMT, the incident record showed no later status. The condition of the zones and restoration work described here is therefore tied to the 10:12 update.

The two unavailable cloud zones were part of a larger disruption at Yandex, but the company’s service notice and reports of customer-facing problems describe different effects. Yandex said some of its services were unavailable; its cloud record documented the status of the two zones and the platform’s emergency mode. It did not establish how long the outage would last.

Two earlier facilities had also been affected

The Vladimir incident followed damage at Yandex facilities in Sasovo and Kaluga. In an Oct. 9 statement, Yandex said an attack on the night of Oct. 7–8 had seriously damaged the Sasovo data center and completely shut it down. The company said an attack on Oct. 9 had put part of the Kaluga facility’s infrastructure out of service. Yandex reported no employee injuries at either earlier site.

Yandex described a complete shutdown at Sasovo and a partial infrastructure outage at Kaluga; it reported a complete halt in operations at Vladimir. Reuters characterized Vladimir as the third major Yandex data center affected in recent days, while The Associated Press described three facilities affected in four days. Those accounts identify three affected facilities, not three complete shutdowns.

In the statement cited by Reuters, Yandex said infrastructure at the Vladimir data center had been damaged and operations completely halted. The company did not quantify the physical damage in that statement.

Cross-border service problems were reported by AP

The Associated Press, citing the Russian outlet Astra, reported that users in dozens of Russian cities and in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia had trouble ordering taxis or accessing banking services. That scope is AP’s account of Astra’s reporting, not a confirmed count of affected users. Yandex separately said some of its services were unavailable.

AP characterized the attack as Ukrainian. Yandex and Reuters described a drone attack but did not establish who carried it out. The reported customer service problems and the cloud-zone outage show separate aspects of the disruption; the available status update describes the cloud situation at 10:12 GMT, not its later course.