Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of Yandex's largest data centers between October 8 and October 11, damaging all three supercomputers the Russian tech giant uses to train its YandexGPT model and triggering outages across Russian payments, search, email, e-commerce, ride-hailing, delivery, and mapping services. Yandex's search engine alone accounts for about 70% of the Russian market, and its cloud customers include large grocery chains, fast-food operators, and a household appliance retailer, according to The Moscow Times.
Russia opened the data-center phase of the war in late September, hitting Ukrainian data centers and mobile networks and temporarily cutting internet and cell service for up to 100,000 households in Kyiv. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy framed the strikes on Yandex as a symmetrical response.
“symmetrical response”— Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukrainian President
The first Ukrainian strike on October 8 damaged a Yandex facility in the Sasovo region southeast of Moscow, which houses two of the three YandexGPT supercomputers. Chervonenkis is rated at 29.42 petaflops and ranks 101 on the Top 500 list; Lyapunov is rated at 20.03 petaflops and ranks 161. Both are built on Nvidia A100 GPUs. Damage to the hardware itself has not been quantified.
Key facts
- 01Ukrainian drones struck three Yandex data centers between October 8 and October 11, damaging all three supercomputers used to train YandexGPT.
- 02The Chervonenkis (29.42 petaflops), Lyapunov (20.03 petaflops), and Galushkin (20.64 petaflops) supercomputers run on Nvidia A100 GPUs and rank 101, 161, and 134 on the Top 500 list.
- 03The Kaluga facility hit on October 9 is one of Russia's largest data centers, with a 63-megawatt capacity.
- 04Yandex's search engine holds roughly 70% of the Russian market; its cloud outages have disrupted payments, email, e-commerce, ride-hailing, delivery, and maps.
- 05An IT expert cited by Kommersant estimates up to six months to replace damaged equipment.
A second strike on October 9 hit a Yandex data center in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow, one of the country's largest at 63 megawatts of capacity. On October 11, a third strike forced Yandex to suspend operations at its Vladimir facility east of Moscow, which houses the third supercomputer, Galushkin, rated at 20.64 petaflops and ranked 134 on the Top 500.
Russian milbloggers argued that the concentration of Yandex's infrastructure in a small number of large nodes turned a national advantage into a wartime liability. The post by Ratio Militaris was translated by the pseudonymous researcher ChrisO_wiki.
“Yandex and the digital ecosystem it created that had long been one of Russia's advantages compared to even Western countries, has proven to be a weak link—including, and even primarily, due to hyper-centralization”— Ratio Militaris, Russian milblogger
Russian companies have limited options for building backup capacity abroad. The 2019 Sovereign Internet Law, signed by President Vladimir Putin, has pushed Russian firms away from foreign infrastructure, while sanctions have closed off Western providers. The milblogger Artjockey argued that Belarus and Kazakhstan lack the necessary capacity, and that shifting key services and registries to China would require legislative changes.
Ukraine's digital ecosystem is more decentralized, built around smaller data centers, with some equipment and networks moved underground or outside the country. Microsoft and Amazon have provided free cloud services to migrate essential government workloads to Europe. Amazon Web Services alone is hosting more than 15 petabytes of data from over 60 Ukrainian government organizations and from DTEK, Ukraine's largest private energy company.
An unnamed IT expert cited by Kommersant said Yandex may need up to six months to replace the damaged data center equipment. Ars Technica noted a parallel: Amazon faced its own lengthy recovery after Iranian drone strikes hit data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates earlier this year.
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