Yandex shut down its Vladimir data center, east of Moscow, after a drone strike damaged it Sunday, the company said in a service alert, making it the third Yandex site hit in four days. The outage took more than 80 Yandex Cloud services offline, including the YandexGPT API. The sites struck on Oct. 8 and Oct. 11 house all three supercomputers Yandex uses to train its AI models.

What Changed

AI-generated summary, reviewed by an editor. More on our AI guidelines.

Services interrupted

Sunday’s cloud outages affected computing, storage, databases and developer tools, including Compute Cloud, Object Storage and Managed Kubernetes. Users also reported failures in banking applications and the retail platforms Magnit and Fix Price. Those third-party disruptions were user reports, without confirmation from the companies.

Pavel Belyavskiy, a Yandex Taxi driver, canceled rides Sunday after being unable to contact passengers. “I’d press the ‘call’ button to contact them, but nothing happens,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do, so I’m just forced to cancel.”

The earlier strikes hit Sasovo in the Ryazan region on Oct. 8 and Kaluga on Oct. 9. Yandex said no injuries were reported at Vladimir.

Network measurements

Yandex Cloud’s status page showed at least 84 of its services offline on Oct. 11. NetBlocks measurements put network traffic at 30% of its reference level for Yandex Cloud and 63% for Yandex LLC that day. The baseline period for those percentages was not specified.

On Oct. 11, Cloudflare recorded bot traffic from the Yandex network at 0.4% of the maximum HTTP requests recorded during the preceding two weeks. Traffic had initially fallen to around 57% of that comparison level on Oct. 8. The measurement covers only bot requests from Yandex’s network.

AI hardware condition unclear

The Sasovo facility houses Lyapunov and Chervonenkis, while Vladimir houses Galushkin. Yandex runs Russia’s most popular search engine and developed the YandexGPT model, and Chervonenkis is its most powerful supercomputer.

Fire Point, the Ukrainian manufacturer of FP-1 drones, says its drones carried out the Vladimir and Kaluga strikes. Defense Express, a Ukrainian defense publication, says an FP-1 also struck Sasovo and all three supercomputers are inoperable. The condition of the supercomputers is not established, and Yandex has not reported on it. Independent verification of the extent of damage was not available.

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Ukraine has not officially confirmed involvement in Sunday’s strike. “We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Oct. 8. Russian strikes beginning around Sept. 23 had damaged or destroyed Ukrainian data centers belonging to at least eight companies by Oct. 8.

Recovery underway

Yandex’s afternoon update on Oct. 11 said access to Alice, Search, Maps, Taxi and Mail was gradually returning. Some functions remained unavailable. Engineers were prioritizing services used by the most people.

Dima Pirogov, who heads Yandex’s fintech business, addressed customers that evening. “First the most important thing: all your money is safe,” Pirogov wrote on Telegram. Account records were stored in multiple copies at different sites. “We checked their integrity: not a single record has been lost.”

Pirogov wrote that many customers still could not check a balance, pay for a purchase or transfer money, and that restoration was continuing. Pirogov gave no recovery timeline. He wrote: “I understand that you are waiting not for words, but for access to your money.”

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened at Yandex's Vladimir data center?

Yandex said in a service alert that a drone strike damaged the site east of Moscow on Sunday, Oct. 11, and that it shut the data center down. The company said no injuries were reported.

Which Yandex services went offline?

More than 80 Yandex Cloud services were affected, including the YandexGPT API, Compute Cloud, Object Storage and Managed Kubernetes. Yandex Cloud's status page showed at least 84 services offline on Oct. 11. Users also reported failures in banking apps and at retailers Magnit and Fix Price, which those companies did not confirm.

Were Yandex's AI supercomputers damaged?

That is not established. Sasovo houses the Lyapunov and Chervonenkis machines and Vladimir houses Galushkin. Defense Express, a Ukrainian defense publication, says all three are inoperable. Yandex has not reported on their condition.

Has Ukraine confirmed it carried out the strike?

Ukraine has not officially confirmed involvement in the Oct. 11 strike. Fire Point, the Ukrainian maker of FP-1 drones, says its drones carried out the Vladimir and Kaluga strikes. President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Oct. 8, "We always respond in mirror-like fashion."

Is customer money in Yandex Pay safe?

Dima Pirogov, who heads Yandex's fintech business, wrote on Telegram that all customer money is safe and that no account record was lost. He said many customers still could not check a balance, pay or transfer money, and he gave no recovery timeline.

AI-generated summary, reviewed by an editor. More on our AI guidelines.

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