A second attack hit Yandex’s Kaluga data center on October 9. The company said part of that facility’s infrastructure was knocked out of service. No employees were injured in either the Sasovo or Kaluga attacks, according to Yandex.
The third incident came on October 11, when a drone attack damaged Yandex infrastructure in Vladimir. The company halted operations at the facility and warned customers that its remaining cloud resources were unstable while it assessed the damage. Yandex advised customers to activate alternative disaster-recovery arrangements where possible.
The Vladimir site houses Galushkin, the third of Yandex’s AI-training supercomputers. Combined with the earlier Sasovo strike, that means facilities containing all three machines have now been targeted. Reports identify Chervonenkis, Lyapunov and Galushkin as systems built with Nvidia A100 GPUs, but Yandex has not disclosed whether the supercomputers themselves survived the attacks.
The incidents have affected more than Yandex’s AI infrastructure. The company operates search, cloud computing, payments, mapping, ride-hailing, delivery, media and other digital services, while outside businesses also depend on Yandex Cloud. Users reported problems across multiple services as the company shifted parts of its infrastructure into emergency operation.
Yandex acknowledged after the first two strikes that restoring its infrastructure could take time.
“We are continuing to assess the condition of our infrastructure,” the company said. “For now, it is very difficult to say when the equipment at the data centers will be back up and running.”
The attacks followed Russian strikes against Ukrainian data centers and telecommunications infrastructure. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described Ukraine’s actions as a response to those attacks.
“We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” Zelenskyy said following the Sasovo strike. “You all know, they have been hitting and continue to hit our data centres. We are responding. I can’t share all the details.”
The sequence of strikes has exposed how disruption at a small number of major facilities can affect a wide range of Yandex services simultaneously. The company said after the Vladimir attack that some services were unavailable while engineers evaluated recovery options and worked to stabilize its remaining infrastructure.
The full condition of Yandex’s AI hardware remains unclear. While the three targeted facilities contain the company’s three AI supercomputers, available reports do not establish that the machines themselves were destroyed or damaged beyond repair.
This analysis is based on reporting from ars TECHNICA.
Image courtesy of Mediasat.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
