A Ukrainian drone strike hit Yandex's Vladimir data center, the third of the company's five large facilities to be struck within a single week, forcing Yandex to pause operations there. The two earlier strikes hit the Sasovo data center, which houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers and suffered a fire, and the Kaluga facility. Yandex reported that at least 84 services were taken down and that its platform continues to operate in limited mode, though the company stated all financial records remain intact, stored in multiple copies across different platforms. Cloudflare's traffic tracker recorded bot HTTP requests from Russia falling to just 0.3 percent of their maximum on the morning of October 11, recovering only to approximately 10 percent.
Three strikes against Yandex's data center infrastructure within one week demonstrate how concentrated physical data center assets create acute, measurable disruption to cloud services at national scale, with 84 services simultaneously unavailable and payment systems impaired across Russia. The near-total collapse of bot HTTP traffic originating in Russia, as measured by Cloudflare, illustrates the cascading internet-level consequences that physical attacks on major data center operators can produce.
A third strike on the Yandex data center in Russia is a notable escalation of ongoing infrastructure attacks, directly relevant to data center resilience and security. The previously published story covered two strikes in consecutive days, making this third strike a new and distinct event.