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Services experiencing disruptions include the voice assistant Alice, Yandex Music, the Telemist video calling service, and Yandex Home. (Photo: @exilenova_plus)
A drone attack damaged a Yandex data center in Vladimir, Russia, overnight on Oct. 11, forcing the facility to completely suspend operations and disrupting the company's cloud and consumer services, Exilenova+ Telegram channel reported on Oct. 11.
"Infrastructure at the Yandex data center in Vladimir was damaged as a result of a drone attack. Operations at the data center have been completely suspended. Some Yandex services are unavailable to users," the company's press service told Interfax.
No employees were injured, Yandex said, adding that emergency crews and company specialists were working to deal with the consequences of the attack.
Residents of Vladimir Oblast reported multiple explosions overnight before widespread problems emerged across Yandex's digital infrastructure.
Yandex Cloud reported power disruptions in its ru-central1-a availability zone, which is physically hosted at the company's data center in Vladimir's Energetik district.
Monitoring channels reported disruptions affecting more than 80 Yandex Cloud services and components.
Among the affected consumer products were the Alice voice assistant, Yandex Music, the Telemost video conferencing service and Yandex Home.
Problems were also reported across Yandex Cloud's computing and network infrastructure, databases, storage systems, developer tools and artificial intelligence services, including the YandexGPT API.
Russian authorities had issued a drone warning in Vladimir Oblast before the disruptions.
It was not immediately clear who carried out the attack.
Third Yandex data center hit in four days
The Vladimir strike marks the third reported drone attack on a major Yandex data center since Oct. 8.
A drone strike on Yandex's facility in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, on Oct. 8 caused a fire and completely halted operations.
Yandex later said it could not determine whether equipment damaged at the Sasovo site could be restored.
The facility hosts two of Yandex's three major supercomputers used for artificial intelligence development.
On Oct. 9, another drone attack damaged Yandex's data center in Kaluga Oblast.
Several modules at the Kaluga facility were completely knocked out of operation, while other services experienced disruptions.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Oct. 9 that Ukraine had struck another Russian data center as a "symmetrical response" to Russian attacks on Ukrainian digital infrastructure.
Ukrainian defense manufacturer Fire Point said FP-1 drones were used in the Kaluga strike.
There has been no official Ukrainian confirmation of involvement in the Oct. 11 attack on the Vladimir facility.
Russia has also intensified attacks on Ukrainian telecommunications and data infrastructure in recent weeks.
Russian strikes previously knocked Kyiv-based data centers operated by Omega Telecom and DLine.ua out of service.
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