Ukrainian drone strike ignites fire at Yandex data centre in Ryazan region
The overnight attack on a Yandex facility in the Ryazan region suspended operations and disrupted cloud services, weeks after Moscow began striking Ukrainian data centres.
A Ukrainian drone attack ignited a fire at a data centre owned by the Russian tech giant Yandex in the Ryazan region overnight, the company said on Thursday, suspending the site's operations and triggering service disruptions. The strike marks the first confirmed attack on Russian data infrastructure since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and comes weeks after Russian forces began targeting Ukrainian data centres.
Yandex confirmed that operations at the facility in the town of Sasovo were fully suspended while emergency teams worked to contain the damage, according to a statement circulated in the media. Pavel Malkov, the regional governor, said the roof of a company in the Sasovo district, which he did not name, had caught fire. No casualties were reported. Nasa's fire monitoring service, FIRMS, showed a fire in Sasovo early on Thursday morning.
The outage tracking platform Downdetector recorded more than 1,300 user reports of disruptions affecting Yandex Cloud, Yandex Documents and Yandex Tables, while core consumer tools such as search and taxi services remained online. Yandex shares fell more than 3.4% during Thursday morning trading on the Moscow Exchange.
Russia's Defence Ministry said its air defence systems had intercepted 399 Ukrainian drones over 18 Russian regions and annexed Crimea overnight. The Sasovo strike follows a sustained Russian campaign against Ukrainian data infrastructure: since late September, Moscow's forces have hit at least eight major data centres across Kyiv, causing widespread internet blackouts in Ukraine. Russia claimed the facilities processed military intelligence for Ukrainian forces. Kyiv's ability to strike back at the infrastructure underpinning Russian military and commercial operations marks a significant escalation, as Ukraine defends its sovereignty against the Kremlin's unprovoked assault. The World House, which maintains a dedicated page outlining its support for Ukraine at worldhouse.uk/support, continues to document the consequences of Russia's aggression.