Drones hit Yandex site in first major attack on Russian data hub

Drones hit a data centre owned by Russia’s Yandex, the country’s leading AI and technology company said on Thursday, in the first major attack on a Russian data hub since the start of the war with Ukraine. Mutual drone attacks by Russia and Ukraine this year have gradually spread across the economy, from energy facilities and refineries to ports and vessels carrying oil and grain, e-commerce warehouses and, most recently, data centres. Russia has conducted a strike campaign on Ukrainian data centres and telecommunications infrastructure over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv. Yandex said the attack on its Sasovo hub, one of its five large data centres, caused a fire and forced it to suspend operations at the site, which hosts tens of thousands of servers. It said it was restoring affected services. The company, often dubbed “Russia’s Google”, said its core consumer services were not affected, but did not describe the extent of the damage. On the website of its Yandex Cloud service, the company advised customers there were problems with the electricity supply to one data centre “zone” and recommended using others. Ukrainian attacks on Russia have led to fuel shortages and queues at petrol stations, losses for tens of thousands of small businesses involved in e-commerce, and higher inflation as rising fuel costs feed through to consumer prices. Critically important infrastructure Russian President Vladimir Putin in August gave the state ​the power to take control of critically important infrastructure if ‌it is deemed to be poorly protected from drone attacks. There were previously no confirmed major Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian data centres. Russia’s RBC news outlet reported on Thursday, quoting sources, that businesses were in talks with the government on developing data centres in countries deemed ‘friendly’ by Moscow. Some Ukrainian data centres were forced to suspend operations after sustaining damage, while 100,000 households suffered temporary internet outages after one attack. Ukraine’s digital minister told Reuters last month that the country was moving digital infrastructure underground in response to Russian attacks. Yandex, which created Russia’s first search engine in 1997 and is one of the few major Russian companies not under Western sanctions, runs YandexGPT, one of Russia’s leading AI models, as well as a cloud computing service and a range of other consumer products, including Yandex Taxi and Yandex Music. Sberbank, Yandex’s main domestic competitor, which is developing the rival GigaChat model, says Russian AI developers lag their US and Chinese counterparts by six to nine months.