Yandex Sasovo data centre down after drone strike; service restoration unlikely

Russian technology firm Yandex has declared its ru-central1-b cloud availability zone unavailable following a kinetic attack on its infrastructure. The incident occurred at the company’s data centre in Sasovo, a town located approximately 300 kilometres southeast of Moscow. Yandex’s status page confirms the outage, citing a fire caused by a drone strike as the direct reason for the disruption to its cloud computing services.

What caused the outage and where did it happen?

The disruption stems from a drone attack that ignited a fire at Yandex’s data centre in Sasovo. According to Yandex, this event affected part of its cloud infrastructure and has led to a complete halt in data centre operations. The company has not publicly identified the source of the drone strike, though Ukrainian press reports indicate that President Volodymyr Zelensky has previously stated his government responds in kind to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres.

Is it possible to restore services in this zone?

Yandex has advised users that restoring service in the near future will not be possible. Reuters reports that the company remains uncertain whether full operations at the Sasovo facility can ever be recovered. In the interim, Yandex has recommended that customers employ unspecified alternative service restoration plans, including the use of its own bare metal servers, to maintain business continuity while the affected zone remains offline.

How does this compare to other recent attacks on cloud infrastructure?

If Yandex is forced to write off the Sasovo data centre, it would mark the second instance this year of a major cloud provider losing facilities to drone attacks. Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services decided its Bahrain facility could not be recovered after an Iranian drone strike. Iran targeted AWS because it believed the cloud giant hosts workloads for the US military and its suppliers, aiming to disrupt hostilities through infrastructure damage.

What does this mean for cloud resilience strategies?

Industry executives have long warned that data centres are critical infrastructure and likely targets for kinetic attacks during conflicts, either directly or via energy and communications grid disruptions. Cloud providers and pundits consistently advise using multiple geographically dispersed availability zones and different cloud suppliers to improve resilience. This incident underscores the physical risks to digital infrastructure, moving beyond traditional cyber threats to include direct military or paramilitary action against hardware facilities.

What to do and how to stay safe: Yandex

• Review your current cloud architecture to ensure workloads are distributed across multiple geographically dispersed availability zones.
• Develop and test alternative service restoration plans that do not rely on a single physical location or data centre.
• Monitor vendor status pages for real-time updates on infrastructure outages and follow official guidance for migration.
• Consider diversifying cloud providers to reduce exposure to single-point physical failures in any one vendor’s network.

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General security guidance from the DarkWeb Dispatch newsroom. It is not confirmed advice from the organisations named in this story.

Frequently asked questions

Which Yandex Cloud availability zone is affected?

The ru-central1-b availability zone is currently down due to the drone attack on the Sasovo data centre.

Has Yandex confirmed who launched the drone attack?

Yandex has not commented on the source of the drone attack, though Ukrainian press reports suggest a link to ongoing conflicts.

Can Yandex restore services in the Sasovo zone soon?

Yandex has stated that it will not be possible to restore service in the near future and is uncertain about long-term recovery.