Drones hit Yandex's third data center, disrupting popular services across Russia
Photo: Yandex's data center came under attack in Russia's Vladimir region (Getty Images)
Drones attacked Yandex's data center in Russia's Vladimir region on the night of October 11. The company confirmed that its operations had been completely halted, and dozens of services across the country stopped working, according to the OSINT channel Exilenova+ and monitoring channels.
Residents began reporting explosions in the region overnight. According to them, Yandex's data center in the city of Vladimir was hit.
It has a capacity of 50 MW and is designed to accommodate 2,880 server racks. Russian authorities have not yet issued any official comments on the attack.
The first services to go offline were those used by Russians every day: the Alisa voice assistant, Yandex Music, the Telemost video conferencing service, and Yandex Home.
Drones attacked Yandex's data center in Russia's Vladimir region on the night of October 11. The company confirmed that its operations had been completely halted, and dozens of services across the country stopped working, according to the OSINT channel Exilenova+ and monitoring… pic.twitter.com/MG8ctbPENG
— RBC-Ukraine (@NewsUkraineRBC) October 11, 2026
However, the outage turned out to be much more extensive. More than 80 key services in Yandex Cloud availability zones stopped working. These included computing and networking resources, databases and storage, AI services, including the YandexGPT API, as well as tools for developers and businesses.
Later, Yandex confirmed that the data center in Vladimir had been completely shut down due to a drone attack. According to the company, no one was injured. Earlier, Yandex Cloud had reported power supply disruptions in one of the platform's availability zones.
Alexander Avdeyev, governor of Russia's Vladimir region, confirmed that drones had attacked infrastructure on the outskirts of Vladimir. A fire broke out following the strike, and 5,000 residents were left without electricity after two substations were shut down. Power supply is expected to be restored using a backup system once the threat has passed.
Residents of houses closest to the attacked facility are being evacuated. According to the governor, no residential buildings were destroyed, and there have been no reports of casualties so far.
On October 8, drones attacked the company's largest data center in Russia's Ryazan region. A major fire broke out there; smoke was visible from several kilometers away, and Yandex services across Russia began experiencing disruptions. On the same day, the company removed data centers in four Russian regions from its maps, including the one that was attacked.
Meanwhile, Russia is striking Ukrainian data centers in an attempt to disrupt communications. Following another attack, the Omega Telecom data center in Kyiv ceased operations. Earlier, Russian forces destroyed the dline.ua data center in Kyiv, leaving it unable to operate.
