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A Ukrainian drone strike hit a Yandex-operated data center in Sasovo, in Russia’s Ryazan region, overnight on October 8, starting a fire and temporarily shutting the facility. No injuries were reported, but disruptions affected Yandex services and other companies using its infrastructure. The damage to equipment, including two supercomputers, is unknown; an expert told Meduza that further regional outages are possible but a nationwide internet blackout is unlikely.
Ukrainian forces struck a Yandex-operated data center in Sasovo, in Russia’s Ryazan region, with drones overnight on October 8, causing a fire and temporarily shutting the facility, according to reporting by Meduza. No injuries were reported, but the outage disrupted some Yandex services and other companies that used the site’s infrastructure; the extent of physical damage remains unknown.
Users reported problems accessing Yandex Disk and Yandex Documents in the morning. Disruptions later affected Yandex Mail and services operated by or associated with Cian, Avito and IVI, as well as MegaFon, Russian Railways and T-Bank. Property developers and media outlets were also among those reporting problems, Meduza said. The publication reported that the spread of outages during the day may have been linked to efforts to redistribute server capacity after the Sasovo fire.
The facility occupies part of a former machine-tool factory and houses two of Yandex’s three supercomputers, Lyapunov and Chervonenkis, which are used to train neural networks. It is not known whether either system was damaged. Meduza reported that Yandex shares had fallen by more than 3% after the strike, citing Moscow Exchange data; that figure describes the reported market movement, not the physical impact on the company.
The strike’s effect on data depends on what was stored and how it was backed up. Meduza cited Yandex’s 2019 description of its cloud storage system, which said customer data was replicated across four availability zones. Other companies’ virtual machines hosted at the site may have different safeguards: customers are responsible for backing up that data themselves, unless they used a separate backup service or another solution.
Why Regional Outages Can Spread
The outage shows how a strike on one facility can affect services beyond the operator itself. Data centers hold user files and host computing capacity rented by other organizations, so a facility shutdown can interrupt websites, business systems and public-facing services at the same time. In Sasovo, reported disruptions reached a range of companies, although the precise technical links between each service and the site have not been detailed.
It does not follow that a single strike can take down Russia’s internet. Sarkis Darbinyan, a digital-rights lawyer and RKS.global expert, told Meduza that major technology companies distribute infrastructure across the country and can reroute traffic when equipment fails. He said attacks on regional facilities could cause local disruptions, including to government systems, school gradebooks, medical software and connected cash registers, with recovery taking from several hours to a day as administrators reconfigure systems.
Darbinyan told Meduza that Russia has close to 200 data centers, with major facilities concentrated in Moscow and the surrounding region. A nationwide outage would require a much broader disruption, he said. The strike nevertheless raises questions about the resilience of regional infrastructure and the costs of restoring services and protecting facilities during the war.
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A Strike Amid Digital Attacks
Meduza framed the Sasovo strike against a backdrop of attacks on digital infrastructure in both countries. It reported that Russian forces had damaged or destroyed data centers belonging to at least eight companies in Ukraine since late September. Russia’s Defense Ministry described its strikes on Ukrainian digital infrastructure as a “forced digital detox,” according to Meduza.
The outlet also noted that Ukrainian forces have struck large retail warehouses, after which Wildberries’ management chose to distribute inventory among smaller facilities. Meduza raised the possibility that Yandex could consider a similar approach to reduce the consequences of future attacks, but it did not report that the company had announced such a plan.
Data centers typically use backup generators for power failures, multiple telecom connections and automatic fire-suppression systems, Meduza explained. Those protections address common technical incidents; the report said facilities have proved vulnerable to drone strikes. Whether the Sasovo site can be restored, and whether Yandex will change how it distributes its infrastructure, has not been established.
“All of this data is replicated: When an object is edited, created, or deleted, every copy is updated.”
— Yandex, in a 2019 statement quoted by Meduza
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Damage, Recovery and Future Targets
The full extent of the fire damage is not known, including whether the Lyapunov and Chervonenkis supercomputers were affected. Yandex’s restoration plans and the duration of the disruption were not established in the source report. It is also unclear which affected companies had independent backups or how much customer data, if any, was lost.
Further strikes cannot be predicted with certainty, Meduza said. Darbinyan told the outlet that regional facilities operated by Rostelecom, Sber, VK or Selectel could in theory be targeted, but the report did not cite evidence of a specific planned attack. He also discussed MSK-IX, Russia’s largest internet exchange point, as a possible point of concern; his comments describe potential effects, not a confirmed threat or attack.
A strike on MSK-IX could slow internet access and overload alternative links, Darbinyan told Meduza, but he said it would not shut down the internet entirely. These assessments are expert views reported by Meduza, not official evaluations of the Sasovo incident.
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Damage Assessment and Service Restoration
The immediate next steps are to determine the condition of the Sasovo facility and restore affected services. The source report did not provide a timetable from Yandex or identify when the site might resume normal operations. Further detail from the company or affected customers would clarify which systems were interrupted and whether data or equipment was lost.
Customers that hosted virtual machines at the facility may need to rely on their own backups or any separate backup service they had arranged. For Yandex cloud users, the company’s previously described replication system could help protect stored files, but the report did not confirm whether every relevant service or data set was covered in this incident. The duration and scale of recovery remain uncertain.
Any decision by Yandex to rebuild, relocate equipment or distribute capacity among more sites would be a separate development. Meduza raised those possibilities but reported no decision. Further information on the damage, service restoration and any changes to infrastructure will be needed to assess the incident’s longer-term consequences.
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Key Questions
What happened to Yandex’s data center?
According to Meduza, Ukrainian forces struck the Sasovo facility in Russia’s Ryazan region with drones overnight on October 8, causing a fire and a temporary shutdown. No injuries were reported.
Which services were disrupted?
Users reported problems with Yandex Disk and Yandex Documents, followed by disruptions affecting Yandex Mail, Cian, Avito, IVI, MegaFon, Russian Railways and T-Bank, among others, Meduza reported. The full scope and technical cause of each outage were not specified.
Was customer data lost?
No data loss has been confirmed in the source report. Meduza said Yandex had previously described replicating cloud data across four availability zones, while customers hosting virtual machines were responsible for arranging backups themselves.
Could the strike shut down Russia’s internet?
Darbinyan told Meduza that a regional data-center strike could cause local outages but would be unlikely to take down the country’s internet. He said Russia’s infrastructure is distributed and that systems can reroute traffic, though an attack on a major exchange point could cause significant slowdowns.
Is Yandex planning to move or rebuild the facility?
The report did not describe a decision or timetable from Yandex. Meduza said restoration would depend partly on the severity of the damage and raised distributing capacity across smaller facilities as a possibility, not an announced plan.
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