Ukrainian drones shut down a Yandex data centre in Russia's Vladimir region on October 11, the company's third facility knocked out in four days, the Associated Press reported.
Bot traffic from Yandex's network (AS13238) in the seven days to October 10, 2026. Source: Cloudflare Radar, via X
"Operations at the data center have been completely halted. There were no injuries," Yandex Cloud said. Users in dozens of Russian cities and in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia were unable to order taxis or reach banking services, the AP said, citing the independent outlet Astra.
The strikes carry Ukraine's campaign against Russia's civilian economy into the computing power behind Moscow's AI ambitions. An attack on October 8 shut Yandex's data hub at Sasovo in the Ryazan region, home to two of the three supercomputers the company uses to develop its AI models, Al Jazeera reported. Drones partly disabled its large data centre in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow the next day.
Yandex said several modules at the Kaluga site had gone offline and some services could be disrupted, Newsweek reported. Kaluga Governor Vladislav Shapsha said 26 drones were shot down over the region but others hit, injuring nine people.
Kyiv has not claimed the attacks. After the Ryazan strike, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukraine would "always respond in mirror-like fashion" to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres, which hit facilities and internet exchanges in Kyiv on September 25.
The damage shows up in internet traffic data. HTTP requests that Cloudflare Radar classes as automated from Yandex's network fell in steps after October 7 and dropped to zero late on October 10, according to a chart from the monitoring service shared on X. Cloudflare counts 99.6% of the requests from the network as bot traffic.
"Ukraine's drone strikes on Yandex data centers have put Russia's bot activity there on hold," commentator Michael A. Arouet wrote on X, suggesting pro-Kremlin posts on the platform could dry up "for a while".
Yandex handles around 70% of Russia's search queries and runs the generative AI model YandexGPT, as well as taxi, delivery and cloud services used by businesses across the country.