Yandex shuts Vladimir data center after drone attack

Yandex has completely suspended operations at its Vladimir data center after the infrastructure was damaged by a drone attack on Saturday night (10), according to a company statement reported by the state news agency TASS on Sunday. The company stated that there were no injuries. This marks the third facility of the group to be hit since Thursday (8), and the second to halt operations entirely.

The sequence began in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, where a drone-triggered fire took the center offline on Thursday. On Friday (9), an attack in the Kaluga region left several modules of another data center completely disabled, according to Yandex itself. Ukrainian outlets such as UNN and ua.news report that more than 80 services from Yandex Cloud became unavailable following the incident in Vladimir; dev.ua cites Yandex Music and Telemost among those affected. Yandex did not attribute responsibility for the attacks, and the Kyiv Independent noted that there was no official Ukrainian comment regarding Vladimir.

An Entire Zone Offline

The damage in Sasovo is the most severe. Yandex Cloud's status page linked the outage of the availability zone ru-central1-b to the fire, and the company stated that, for now, it cannot confirm whether the equipment at that location can be recovered. Yandex did not provide a timeline for the return of the zone.

Sasovo hosts two of the three supercomputers that Yandex uses to train its AI models, according to Meduza and Tom's Hardware. The company did not report whether the machines were damaged.

The corporate exposure is substantial. In the first half of 2026, Yandex Cloud reached 64,000 clients, a 36% increase from the previous year, generating revenues of 16.7 billion rubles, 30% more, according to the company's financial report. For this corporate audience, the Russian law on personal data localization, in effect since 2015, limits options to migrate workloads outside the country.

The Gulf Precedent

Public cloud architecture operates on the premise that availability zones fail independently. Drones produce correlated failures, and AWS experienced this on March 1, 2026, in the United Arab Emirates. The zone mec1-az2 in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region was "impacted by objects hitting the data center," according to the company, a day after Iran launched missiles and drones against the Emirates, as reported by DatacenterDynamics. Firefighters cut power to the building and generators. Hours later, the zone mec1-az3 also went down, and AWS warned that, "with two availability zones significantly impacted," customers were seeing high failure rates in data ingress and egress. The recommendation was to move S3 ingestion to another region. Amazon never confirmed what struck the building.

In Vladimir, Sasovo, and Kaluga, Yandex lost or degraded three facilities in about 72 hours. In the Emirates, two out of three zones in the same region were affected. In both cases, the design intended to protect against a power outage or a broken cable did not safeguard against a coordinated attack.

Kyiv and Kazakhstan: Two Escape Routes

Ukraine took the opposite route to Russia. A week before the 2022 invasion, parliament amended the law requiring government data to remain on servers located in Ukrainian territory. By June that year, 10 petabytes from 27 public authorities had migrated to AWS using Snowball devices, according to Amazon. Mykhailo Fedorov, then Deputy Prime Minister responsible for the digital sector, stated afterward that the migration to the cloud "saved the Ukrainian government and economy."

For Yandex clients, the nearest escape route is Kazakhstan. The kz1 region, opened in April 2024, operates with a single availability zone, kz1-a, according to the company's documentation. It has its console and billing in tenge, and Object Storage buckets created in the Russian region are not accessible there. Those who did not prepare replication before the attack will have to do it now, with the source already degraded.

This incident shifts the question that risk committees pose to cloud providers. Until now, the criterion was how many zones a region has. After Sasovo and ME-CENTRAL-1, the question becomes how many kilometers separate these zones, whether they share the same power grid, and if they fall within the range of a single drone. AWS itself describes its zones as separated by "many kilometers," but all within 100 km of each other, a distance easily covered by long-range drones.