Yandex said drone strikes shut two of its data centers and damaged a third in Russia this month, disrupting payments and extending the war’s effects to civilian digital services.
The company said a strike overnight Oct. 7-8 shut its Sasovo facility. Another attack disabled part of its Kaluga site on Oct. 9, and a strike overnight on Oct. 11 shut its Vladimir facility.
After the Vladimir strike, some Yandex Pay users could not check balances, pay for purchases or transfer money, the company said. Their account records remained intact because copies were stored at other sites. Yandex also reported service interruptions, the subject of earlier EconoTimes coverage of the outages.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Oct. 12 that Ukrainian strikes had reached Yandex’s data centers in response to Russian operations against data centers in Ukraine.
United DC said a Sept. 23 strike effectively destroyed its Kyiv data center. The operator stopped using the site and is moving salvaged equipment to Europe. Separately, the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine reported internet problems affecting about 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding region after a Russian attack that day.
In a July 2025 interview with Interfax, the head of a Russian data center operator estimated that Moscow held 80% of Russia’s data center capacity and said many organizations lacked redundancy. The figure was his estimate at the time, rather than a measure of current capacity.
Russia researcher Tetiana Trach of the Institute for the Study of War told the Kyiv Independent that Russian facilities were more exposed. She said strikes could interrupt service locally in Ukraine, but its decentralized network made a countrywide shutdown unlikely.
An Oct. 14 drone attack hit a Sberbank data center under construction in Balakovo, Sberbank First Deputy Chairman Alexander Vedyakhin said, Kommersant reported. Vedyakhin said bank services operated normally. VK said its services remained available after an Oct. 18 attack on its Leningrad region facility.
Russia’s digital development minister, Maksut Shadayev, said his ministry and the Defense Ministry were working to protect IT sites. Yandex gave no timetable for restoring damaged equipment in its Oct. 11 update.
