Major Data Centre Knocked Offline by Drone Strike, Mobile Banking Disrupted
A Ukrainian drone strike hit a major data centre owned by Russian technology company Yandex in the city of Vladimir in the early hours of Sunday (11 October), local time. The attack halted operations at the facility and disrupted more than 80 digital services and cloud infrastructure components.
According to the Kyiv Post, the 40–50-megawatt data centre in the Energetik district was the third precision strike on Yandex’s server infrastructure in the past four days. The information was reported by the Telegram channels ASTRA and Crimean Wind.
The facility was designed to house up to 2,880 server racks and is one of Yandex’s main data-processing centres.
After the explosion, Yandex confirmed that operations at its Vladimir data centre had been suspended. The outage then spread to various digital services in Russia, including the Alice voice assistant, Yandex Music, the Telemost video-conferencing app and Yandex Smart Home.
Services operated by companies using Yandex Cloud were also disrupted. Computing, data storage, database management and software development systems were among those affected.
Affected services included Compute Cloud, Object Storage, Managed Kubernetes, and the PostgreSQL and ClickHouse databases. Developer tools and artificial intelligence services, including the YandexGPT API, SpeechKit and Vision OCR, were also hit.
Mobile banking disrupted
The effects of the attack extended beyond the Yandex ecosystem. Users reported connectivity problems with banking apps, ride-hailing services and major retail chains such as Magnit and Fix Price. The disruption also affected third-party commercial platforms in Russia and neighbouring countries.
Vladimir Region Governor Aleksandr Avdeev said the drone attack damaged several local electricity substations, disrupting the city’s power network.
Avdeev said utility workers had restored heating and water supplies, as well as around 80 per cent of electricity services in the affected part of Vladimir Region, by Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed that its air defence systems had intercepted 479 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones overnight. The drones were detected across 16 Russian regions, including Vladimir, Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk and Rostov, as well as the Crimean Peninsula and the Black Sea.
The strike on the Vladimir data centre adds to a series of attacks on Russia’s cloud-computing infrastructure over the past week.
On Thursday (8 October), Ukrainian drones struck a Yandex data centre in Sasovo, in Ryazan Region. The attack sparked a fire and forced the facility to suspend all operations.
That incident disrupted server infrastructure used by Russian Railways (RZhD), mobile operator MegaFon and several national media organisations.
A day later, drones struck another Yandex facility in Kaluga, the regional capital southwest of Moscow. Yandex confirmed that the attack disabled several of its hardware modules.
Following the series of attacks, Yandex removed the locations of its data centres in four Russian regions from its digital maps platform. The repeated outages also put pressure on Yandex shares, which fell by around 4 per cent on the Moscow Exchange early in the week.
Ukrainian military analysts said systematic attacks on data centres and corporate communications networks could disrupt Russian logistics and company administration, and weaken the digital command-and-control capabilities supporting Russia’s military operations.