Drones strike Yandex’s largest data center in Russia: Footage

As seen in footage released by eyewitnesses, a major fire broke out inside the facility. Smoke could be seen for several kilometers.

Immediately after the first reports of the fire emerged, Russians began complaining about a widespread outage affecting Yandex services. The information was confirmed by the Downdetector service.

Photo: a major fire broke out inside the facility (t.me/supernova_plus)

What is a data center and what significance does it have for Russia?

The Yandex data center in Sasovo is a large data processing and storage center operated by Yandex, located in the city of Sasovo in Russia’s Ryazan region.

The facility is used to house server and network equipment and to support Yandex services and the Yandex Cloud platform.

The complex was built in 2012 and commissioned in 2014. The facility is operated by Yandex group company Yandex DC LLC.

The data center has a powerful autonomous energy infrastructure. A separate 110 kV Yandex substation was built to supply it with electricity and was commissioned in 2014.

The declared maximum power supply capacity was 53 MW. The facility uses uninterruptible power supply systems and diesel generator units.

Yandex calls the Sasovo site the company’s largest data center. The facility is being expanded with separate clusters, but the exact number of servers is not disclosed in publicly available sources.

Russia recently began striking Ukrainian data centers, attempting to disrupt communications in Ukraine. In particular, the Omega Telecom data center recently ceased operations. This happened after another Russian attack.

Before that, the dline.ua data center was also targeted. The facility sustained extensive damage that made it impossible to continue operating.