Ukrainian drones take three Yandex data centers offline

Ukrainian drone strikes damaged three of Yandex's five Russian data centers between 8 and 11 October 2026, forcing the shutdown of two facilities and partially disabling a third. The Sasovo data center was hit on 8 October, Kaluga on 9 October, and Vladimir on 11 October. Network connectivity for Yandex Cloud fell to 30% of normal levels on 11 October, according to internet monitoring organization Netblocks.theregister.com

The strikes matter because Yandex, often called "Russia's Google," provides search, maps, cloud storage, ride-hailing, and payments services that much of Russia's internet infrastructure relies on, serving both government and private-sector organizations. Unlike a conventional cyberattack, physical drone strikes damaged the facilities themselves, cutting off services that millions of users depend on for accessing funds and everyday digital tasks.theverge.com

Three data centers struck in four days

The Sasovo data center was "seriously damaged" in the overnight strike of 7-8 October, leading to a total shutdown. Ukrainian drones struck again on the morning of 9 October, targeting the Kaluga data center and taking part of its infrastructure offline. A third strike hit the Vladimir site on 11 October, which supports Yandex Pay. Yandex reported no injuries related to these incidents.

Yandex engineers are prioritizing the most-used services, with access to the Alice AI assistant, Mail, Maps, Search, and Taxi being restored while other features remain offline. The company's status page lists widespread outages across Yandex Cloud. Maintenance updates describe partial availability, noting that some customers may access the Yandex Cloud Console and API, but availability remains inconsistent across the platform.

Yandex Pay users cannot transfer funds, check balances, or make purchases. Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex's fintech division, said via Telegram that users' money is safe but declined to give a restoration timeline. "I'm very sorry I can't tell you yet that everything is working again," Pirogov wrote. "The team continues to restore services and is checking every step."

Payments and cloud remain offline

Yandex's status page states the Cloud platform is "still operating in a limited mode" with specialists working around the clock. The company said technical support is receiving an increased number of requests, extending response times, and recommended customers use alternative sites for hosting. As of the most recent update, Console, API, IAM, Container Registry, databases, S3 storage, and Kubernetes were available with some issues, while Monium remained offline.

A chart citing Cloudflare data showing a sharp decline in bot traffic after the attacks circulated on social media, with some users inferring it showed Russian disinformation bot farms going offline. The antibot4navalny account said the data "has nothing to do with social media" and that it actually measures requests from automated Yandex web crawlers used for search indexing.

Bot traffic chart misread

Computer scientist Raphael Wimmer said a separate diagram shared by European Parliament member Tomáš Zdechovský, claiming to show declining far-right Alternative for Germany activity, appears to be AI-generated because it includes a data point for a future date of 15 October. Wimmer asked: "Could we (and especially politicians, journalists and scientists who should know better) please stop sharing unverified images?"

Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky said the drone attacks were a response to Russian strikes that had targeted datacenters in Kyiv. In September, Russian drone strikes hit a business center in the capital, killing four people and damaging a datacenter, which caused around 100,000 households to lose internet access. Public transport boards in Lutsk also stopped displaying information.

US president Donald Trump accused Zelensky of wanting "to make problems for the world" by continuing to attack Russian oil refineries, then claimed Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an "energy ceasefire" to halt attacks on each other's energy infrastructure. Kyiv said it was unaware of the agreement before Trump announced it but was willing to halt attacks if Moscow reciprocated.

Russia launched a missile attack on a Ukrainian power plant hours after Trump's ceasefire claim. Yandex has not addressed whether any data stored in the affected data centers has been irreversibly lost, and the company said it cannot provide a reliable service-restoration timeline. Customers have been urged to use alternative infrastructure for disaster recovery while restoration work continues.