Russian tech giant Yandex has reported trouble keeping its services online after Ukrainian drones struck two of its five data centres in the past two days.
Dubbed “Russia’s Google,” Yandex runs the country’s largest search engine and owns popular food‑delivery and taxi apps used by tens of millions.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes were retaliation for weeks of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data infrastructures.
Both sides have stepped up campaigns against each other’s digital infrastructure, with Kyiv claiming that the latest attacks force Russia to allocate resources to repair Yandex’s facilities.
Yandex confirmed that its Sasovo data centre in the Ryazan region was severely damaged overnight, bringing operations there to a halt, while the Kaluga centre suffered partial outages after a Friday morning attack.
The company said the data centres are critical for normal service operation and that it is hard to predict when they will return online.
Staff are working “day and night” to keep services running, but Yandex acknowledges it is not a simple task.
No Yandex employees were reported injured; the regional governor in Kaluga said nine civilians were hurt in a drone hit on the city’s infrastructure.
It is unclear how much the service disruption has affected users, though the company mentioned temporary unavailability of some AI chatbot functions and potential issues with its smart‑home devices.
The Kaluga centre, one of Russia’s largest, covers 130,000 sqm and consumes electricity equivalent to 220,000 UK households annually.
The Sasovo centre houses two of three super‑computers that run Yandex’s AI models; it is unknown whether these were destroyed.
Ukraine’s defence ministry confirmed the attacks and said they could force Russia to divert resources to repair damaged capacity.
Zelensky noted that Kyiv is responding in a “mirror‑like fashion” to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres, which have previously caused widespread internet outages.
The attacks exemplify the escalating battle over digital infrastructure as the conflict drags deeper into the winter months.
