Ukrainian drone strikes disabled two of Yandex’s five data centers in Russia, affecting online services and infrastructure used for artificial-intelligence training. The facilities in Sasovo and Kaluga were hit on October 8 and 9, according to reporting cited by Ars Technica.
The Sasovo site houses two of Yandex’s three supercomputers used to train YandexGPT. The Kaluga facility is described as the company’s largest data center. Yandex said no employees were injured, while users reported problems reaching services including the Ivi streaming platform, T-Bank and Russian Railways, along with several other sites hosted on its infrastructure.
Ukraine described the operation as a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers and communications systems since late September. Ukrainian company Firepoint said its FP-1 one-way drones participated in the Kaluga strike.
The disruption illustrates how concentrated physical infrastructure can become a point of failure for both AI development and ordinary digital services. A data center may support model training, search and cloud customers at the same time, so damage spreads beyond the company that owns the building. The full duration of the outage and the condition of Yandex’s training hardware were not established in the report. No direct evidence was provided that model data was lost, only that facilities and dependent services were disrupted.