10
Loading video...
By Brendan Cole
Senior Reporter
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
Operations at a data center owned by the Russian technology company Yandex have been suspended following a Ukrainian drone attack on Thursday.
Yandex—Russia's leading technology company whose search engine is considered the country's answer to Google—said a fire broke out after a strike on one of its data centers in the town of Sasovo, around 250 miles south-east of Moscow.
Yandex also runs YandexGPT, one of Russia's leading generative AI models.
Read More on World
This is the first confirmed strike against Russian data infrastructure since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and follows Russian attacks against Ukrainian data centers.
Yandex told Newsweek on Thursday it was still assessing the extent of the damage to its infrastructure and that "we cannot confirm whether the equipment at our Sasovo data center can be restored."
...
Disruptions started at around 1:31 a.m Thursday and Yandex warned that the outage could affect other parts of its cloud network.
The complex hosts thousands of servers and is a key part of Russia's digital infrastructure, supporting Yandex's services and cloud computing operations for businesses across Russia**.**
The facility also shares the site of the sanctioned Sasta machine-tool factory, which makes equipment used by Russia's military-industrial sector.
As of Thursday morning, it was unclear whether the Yandex data center, the Sasta plant, or both were the intended targets.
Newsweek has contacted the Ukrainian defense ministry for comment.
Video posted on Telegram channels shows the aftermath of the strikes with flames and smoke billowing into the air.
Following the strikes, Yandex shares dropped more than 3.4 percent during Thursday morning trading on the Moscow Exchange.
Ukraine does not usually immediately confirm strikes on Russian territory, and has not confirmed the latest attack.
It follows Russian forces targeting at least eight major data centers across Kyiv, which has caused internet blackouts across Ukraine. Russia claims the data centers process Ukrainian military intelligence.
In another Ukrainian drone attack overnight, the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat oil refinery in Russia's Bashkortostan region was struck, causing a fire, according to footage and open-source intelligence reports shared on social media.
Footage on the Ukrainian Telegram channel Exile Nova shows the moment the plant was struck and thick smoke and fire coming from the refinery.
The facility is one of Russia’s largest oil refining and petrochemical plants, producing 150 different types of product, and is located 800 miles from the front line in Ukraine.
The plant had previously been hit on September 24 by drones launched by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), according to the Kyiv Independent.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Matthew Robinson and Tony Phillips.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines