Three Yandex data centres in a week

Yandex said operations at its data centre in Vladimir, east of Moscow, had been "completely suspended" after a drone attack on Sunday, Al Jazeera reported. No injuries were reported. It was the third attack on Yandex data centres in a week, Al Jazeera said, and the company described the remaining resource configuration as "unstable".

Several Yandex services were unavailable, according to Al Jazeera, which drew on AFP and Reuters. In a Telegram alert, Yandex told users of its cloud platform that it was running in emergency mode and advised them to activate their disaster-recovery plans. The company had not, in the reports we read, given a timetable for restoring the site.

The sequence, as Al Jazeera set it out: on Thursday 8 October a Ukrainian attack shut Yandex's Sasovo hub, southeast of Moscow, which houses two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company's AI model. On Friday Yandex said its data centre in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, had been struck by Ukrainian drones and partly knocked out of action. Al Jazeera did not say who launched the drones that hit Vladimir. The attributions are the outlet's and Yandex's; Komposite has not independently confirmed who carried out each attack.

Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on Thursday after the Sasovo strike: "We always respond in mirror-like fashion." He added: "You all know, they have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres," according to Al Jazeera, which noted that Russia has struck several Ukrainian data centres and telecom facilities over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv.

Euronews reported on Monday that Cloudflare Radar data showed automated traffic from Yandex's network fell by about 94 per cent on Sunday compared with its average in the second half of September. Euronews cautioned that the figures include legitimate automated traffic such as search-engine crawlers and do not establish whether Kremlin-linked social media bots were affected. Zelenskyy, speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday, said it had become "a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms" after the strikes because there were "fewer bots", Euronews reported, adding that claims of falling bot activity in several countries had circulated without independently verified figures. The sources do not establish a causal link, and we do not draw one.

What the reports do establish is an infrastructure fact. A company Al Jazeera calls "Russia's Google" has had three of its data centres hit in under a week, at least one of them housing AI training hardware, and its cloud customers have been told to invoke recovery plans. Yandex has not said how much capacity it has lost.

For operators elsewhere, the episode adds physical attack to a site-selection conversation that has mostly been about power and permits, and it bears on concentration: by the accounts above, the Sasovo site was central rather than peripheral to the company's AI work. Komposite has covered how AI labs are looking for smaller sites already connected to power, and how a cloud failure reaches customers in the IDCF Cloud outage.