Ukrainian drones strike Yandex's largest data center in 48 hours
A second drone attack in two days hits Russia's biggest tech firm, destroying modules at its flagship Kaluga facility.
What to know
- Two Yandex data centers hit by Ukrainian drones in 48 hours: first Sasovo (Ryazan), then Kaluga—Russia's largest facility with 63 MW capacity and 3,800+ server racks.
- Kaluga center, operational since late 2023, suffered complete module destruction; supports Yandex Cloud and internal services.
- Strikes reflect Ukraine's expanding capability to conduct high-precision strikes on critical infrastructure, potentially enabled by U.S. intelligence and missile support.
- Damage raises questions about hardware replacement under Western embargo and prompts discussions of resilient data center design for conflict zones.
The dispute Source credibility: one commenter dismisses UNITED24 Media as Ukrainian military propaganda and advocates for Reuters instead. · positions read across 18 posts and comments
Ukrainian strikes reflect U.S. military support and intelligence sharing that enabled rapid capability development.
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“USA provides extensive engineering support and technology transfer for Ukraine's domestic development of long-range missiles. Basically everything short of just giving them Tomahawks.”
petcat · Hacker News ↗
Data centers are critical infrastructure ripe for targeting; this signals need for Western resilient design against drone/missile strikes.
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“American and European data center providers should start thinking about design for resiliency versus drone and missile strikes.”
PeterCorless · Hacker News ↗
Russia's ability to replace destroyed hardware under Western embargoes is questionable, amplifying economic damage.
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“How effective are the western embargos? Will it be possible for them to replace destroyed hardware?”
drewg123 · Hacker News ↗
Yandex Russian technology companyUkraine Attacking actorTASS Russian state media
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlespostscomments
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“Several modules of the Yandex data center in Kaluga have been completely taken out of operation as a result of a UAV attack, the company reports.”
— TASS -
first by HN Best, 5d ago · also UNITED24 Media, HN Frontpage
1 more headline
- Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours—Now Its Biggest Russian Site Is Damaged UNITED24 Media · 5d ago
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USA provides extensive engineering support and technology transfer for Ukraine's domestic development of long-range missiles. Basically everything short of just giving them Tomahawks. Ukraine's defense industry capabilities didn't develop so rapidly for no reason.And the quality of targeting is almost entirely because of extensive USA intelligence…
2 more of the top 3 · 18 posts in this stretch
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Russia: Body blows being successfully blocked for the most part Ukraine: Punches the spine
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The Internet is almost 100% packet switching, a technique that someone brilliant in ARPA came up with the idea of claiming it was intended for nuclear warfare survival, in order to ensure funding.“Data centers” need not be hyper-centralized. There’s an economy of scale of course, both in the building itself and in very local transmission. But all…
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background
Ukrainian drone strikes Yandex data center in Sasovo — A Ukrainian drone attack damaged a Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region, with satellite imagery documenting the extent of destruction.
What people are saying 15 voices from 1 site · best of 18 · verbatim
- Will Russia be able to replace destroyed hardware and rebuild the Kaluga data center given Western embargoes?
- How much of Ukraine's targeting precision stems from U.S. intelligence sharing versus domestic capabilities?
- Oct 11
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Is Kagi search still relying on Yandex?A second data centre has been attacked and I've seen reports of Yandex crawlers stopping their work.
- Oct 10
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If you gear up with a translator, you may read this in-depth post on the events made by well-known Ukrainian tech executive Sergiy Petrenko, who also happened to be the CEO of the Ukrainian branch of Yandex in its early days:
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What you even talking about ? What this have to do with Navalny ? (self sacrificing activist populist on the USAID payroll with an agenda dictated from Yale)
- Oct 9
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From reddit - "Right now, Yandex's biggest services are down: taxis, delivery, and Alisa. Moscow is paralyzed; it's impossible to order a taxi. Orders aren't going through."
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The Yandex of today isn't exactly the Yandex of 2020. The people who were at the helm back then whitewashed their reputations, renamed to Nebius, and are now supplying compute to Palantir.
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Don't worry - this could never happen to your cloud provider.It's a totally different situation - they're at war.
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That's one of the reasons that ecologist push-back against "technologists" who say "just build nuclear reactors everywhere"...we want a safe a decentralized infrastructure
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Should we call it "Yandex experiment" from now on? Because it seems like the experiment didn't go well:April 27, 2020:"Yandex highlighted negative articles about Navalny in its search results; the company called it an "experiment."
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"United24Media" is mostly just Ukrainian military propaganda. I wouldn't trust it given some of their other articles.Here's a better source:
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Not just data centers. Europe is close enough to need an all-encompassing national strategy against this.
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American and European data center providers should start thinking about design for resiliency versus drone and missile strikes.
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How effective are the western embargos? Will it be possible for them to replace destroyed hardware?
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Damn, this would have been a good argument for the US to fund Ukrainian long-distance operations, had Russia not been so far behind in the AI race already.
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Seems like a mistake to stagger these hits, doing both in the same hour could have taken out backups before they had a chance to replicate elsewhere.
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Interesting to see this and the targeting of data centers in the Middle East. Its critical infrastructure and a hit gets the attacker a lot of bang for the buck in terms of economic damage.