Drone Strikes on Three Data Centers Force Russian Military to Protect Yandex

Between October 8 and October 11, drone strikes struck three Russian data centers in Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir, damaging infrastructure and triggering widespread outages across corporate services relying on Yandex cloud hosting.

According to Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadaev, the scale of the physical assaults was "unprecedented." The digital ministry stated it is coordinating with the Ministry of Defense to arrange physical coverage for critical data center sites, though officials have not detailed what that defense will entail.

The sequence of strikes unfolded over several days. On the night of October 8, an attack caused a fire at the Sasovo facility in the Ryazan region, forcing a complete shutdown that affected Russian corporate systems and media websites. On October 9, drones hit a data center in Kaluga, where Yandex reported multiple server modules were disabled. By the night of October 11, a third strike in Vladimir damaged infrastructure and shut the entire facility down.

Amid the disruptions, Yandex updated its customer agreements on October 10, adding an explicit clause that frees the company from liability during force majeure events, specifically citing drone attacks.

Services tied to the affected infrastructure—including food delivery and retail systems for Dodo Pizza, M.Video, Lenta, and Magnit—experienced significant disruptions before Yandex reported a gradual restoration. Shadaev credited system redundancy for keeping platforms running, but deploying military assets to guard commercial server barns exposes a physical vulnerability that software failovers cannot resolve.

Source: habr via Kommersant and RBC