Ukrainian drones expose Russia's data centers
Three of Yandex's six largest centers and a Sberbank facility were hit in a week, causing outages in taxis, stores and courts.
In five days, Oct. 7 to 11, Ukrainian drones hit three of the six largest data centers of Yandex, the Russian tech giant. They were the ones at Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, Vladimir and Kaluga. None is near Moscow, the area best defended by Russian air defenses. Sasovo was knocked out of service and housed two of the company's three supercomputers.
On Oct. 14 it was the turn, at night, of Sberbank's Mega Data Center in Balakovo, in the Saratov region. Other reports speak of hits on a VK facility and on a center destroyed Oct. 20 in Donetsk, with no owner identified.
The failures showed on the street. Yandex Go users could not order a taxi, payments and email failed, and chains such as Magnit, Lenta and Lamoda had problems. Dozens of hearings were canceled in courts in Sverdlovsk, Smolensk, Tula, Kostroma, Ivanovo and Yaroslavl, because the electronic court system runs on Yandex Cloud. By Oct. 12, some key services were back.
The blow crossed the border. In Moldova, where Yandex moves about 60% of taxis, the company warned of "technical problems" on Oct. 12 and 13. There were also delays in Kazakhstan, Armenia and Belarus.
The Kremlin half admits it. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov spoke on Oct. 13 of "difficulties" at Yandex that the government is discussing. Serhiy Petrenko, who ran Yandex in Ukraine, estimates the company lost half or more of its capacity; that is his own estimate, not a company figure.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky framed the attacks as a response to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers. On Sept. 23, one of them left about 100 000 homes in Kyiv without internet.
Why they cannot be protected
The centers were built with modern metal structures, not reinforced concrete slabs, to build fast and expand easily. Nobody designed them to withstand drones carrying dozens of kilograms of explosives. At the start of 2026 Russia had about 129 Tor-M1/M2 air defense systems and just over 50 Pantsir, far too few to cover so many sites. Light anti-drone nets do little against fixed-wing drones.
According to Petrenko, about eight in ten of the country's data centers are concentrated in and around Moscow. Academic Nikolay Mitrokhin, of the University of Bremen, puts the figure higher: 95% could be reached by Ukrainian drones. A decree lets the state take temporary control of companies that do not protect their sites.
Western sanctions slow the purchase of equipment, so replacing what was lost could take months.
