Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex. The damage left Yandex struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services. Yandex is widely known as Russia’s Google because it operates the country’s most popular search engine.
The Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8 and October 9. Reuters reported the dates and locations of these strikes. The actions came as a direct response to a Russian drone strike campaign targeting Ukraine’s data centers. That Russian campaign has disrupted mobile phone and internet services for thousands of Ukrainians since late September.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the operations on the social media platform X. He stated that Ukraine continues to respond to Russian attacks with high precision. He confirmed that another data center was hit as a symmetrical response.
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The Ukrainian company Firepoint stated that its FP-1 one-way attack drones were involved in the latest strike on the Kaluga data center. This Kaluga facility is Yandex’s largest data center. The first Ukrainian attack targeted the Sasovo data center. That Sasovo facility houses two of the company’s three supercomputers used for training the YandexGPT AI model.
Yandex reported that no employees were hurt during the incidents. The company acknowledged disruptions to some services. Russian users reported problems accessing media websites and popular apps according to the independent Russian news publication Meduza. Impacted services included the Ivi video streaming platform, the digital banking service T-Bank, and the state-owned Russian Railways.
Other impacted Russian services included a dating app, a real estate aggregator, and a self-publishing book platform. The website of the most successful professional soccer club in the Russian Premier League also experienced issues according to Reuters.
Data centers face growing wartime risks
Targeting data centers is the latest example of such facilities becoming wartime targets in 2026. After the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February, Iranian drones knocked out multiple Amazon data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, Russia has regularly launched mass missile and drone attacks against Ukraine’s cities, power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and residential apartment buildings since Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Ukraine has recently grappled with a shortage of interceptor weapons capable of shooting down Russian missiles and jet-powered drones. However, the Ukrainian military has gradually ramped up its own medium-range and long-range drone strike campaign. These Ukrainian strikes have focused on Russian military bases, supply lines, shipping in the Sea of Azov and Black Sea, and energy infrastructure such as oil refineries. In the summer of 2026, Ukraine also targeted multiple warehouses belonging to the Russian companies Wildberries and Ozon.
In a sign of a potentially widening war, coordinated aerial and sea drone strikes sank two commercial ships in the Black Sea within the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries Romania and Bulgaria on October 5 and October 6. President Zelenskyy attributed those ship attacks to Russia. Yandex stated that it is working to restore normal operations for its affected services.
