Ukrainian drone strike sparks fire at Yandex data centre in Ryazan, halting operations
A Ukrainian drone attack caused a fire at Yandex's data centre in Sasovo, Ryazan region, stopping its services and prompting a drop in the company's shares.
A fire broke out at Yandex's data centre in the town of Sasovo, Ryazan region, after a Ukrainian drone strike ignited part of the facility on Saturday. No injuries were reported, but the centre, which occupies former premises of the Sasta machine-tool plant, has ceased operations entirely.
Yandex warned that several of its services, including its main search platform, Yandex Disk and Yandex Documents, could be unavailable. Outages were also reported on the websites of real-estate portal Cian, Russian Railways and several regional administrations.
The Moscow Exchange recorded a decline of more than 3% in Yandex's share price following the incident.
The Sasovo centre houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers – “Lyapunov” and “Chervonenkis”. The latter was ranked 19th worldwide in the 2021 Top 500 list and is the company's most powerful system. Yandex has not confirmed the condition of the supercomputers after the strike; its third system, “Galushkin”, is located in Vladimir.
Authorities did not specify whether the data centre or the adjacent Sasta plant, which manufactures pipe-threading machines for civilian and defence customers, was the intended target. Ukraine has not commented on the attack.
"The roof of one of the enterprises caught fire after the Ukrainian attack," Ryazan regional officials said.
The incident follows a series of attacks on data-centre infrastructure in Ukraine since late September, which Russian officials have described as targeting facilities that process intelligence data for the Ukrainian armed forces.