Yandex said drones struck its Sasovo data centre, starting a fire and stopping operations at a site that hosts tens of thousands of servers. Core consumer services kept running.
Drones hit a data centre owned by Yandex on Thursday, the company said, in what Reuters described as the first major attack on a Russian data hub since the war in Ukraine began. Operations at the site stopped after a fire.
The strike was on the Sasovo hub in the Ryazan region, one of Yandex's five large data centres, which hosts tens of thousands of servers. Yandex said it was restoring affected services. It said core consumer services were not affected and did not describe the full damage.
On its Yandex Cloud site, the company told customers there were problems with electricity to one data-centre zone and recommended using others. Yandex said in 2021 that Sasovo hosted two of its three supercomputers built around Nvidia A100 chips, used to train YandexGPT. It declined to say whether those machines were hit.
Several Russian online services reported technical issues the same day, including real-estate site Cian, book portal Litmarket, Russian Railways and the website of Spartak Moscow. Reuters did not say those outages were confirmed as caused by the strike.
A later Reuters item on Thursday evening said Yandex could not yet determine whether equipment at the centre can be restored. The company had not published a full damage assessment.
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- Yandex said core consumer services were not affected and that it was restoring services at the Sasovo site.