Russian search engine Yandex struggles after Ukrainian strikes on data centres
Often dubbed "Russia's Google", the tech firm admits customers may experience disruption to digital services due to the attacks.
Russian tech company Yandex says it is struggling to keep services running after Ukrainian drones hit two of its five data centres over the past two days.
Often called "Russia's Google", Yandex operates the country’s most widely used search engine, along with a food-ordering service and a taxi app relied on by tens of millions of people.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes were carried out in response to weeks of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres.
Both sides have intensified attacks on infrastructure in recent months as the war continues. Kyiv says its strikes are meant to hit revenue sources for Moscow’s war effort, and that the latest attacks could compel Russia to shift resources to Yandex.
Yandex said its data centre in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, was "seriously damaged as a result of a drone attack" overnight into Thursday, and that its operations were "completely suspended".
It also said another data centre in Kaluga, a region south-west of Moscow, was attacked on Friday morning, with part of the site’s infrastructure "taken out of service".
On Friday, Yandex said its data centres were "critical" to the normal functioning of its services and that it was "very difficult to predict" when they would be restored.
The company said teams were working "day and night" to keep services operating, but "unfortunately it is not a simple task".
Yandex said none of its employees were injured in the strikes. The regional governor in Kaluga said nine people were injured in a drone attack on the city’s infrastructure.
The full extent of the disruption to Yandex’s services remains unclear, although it told state news agency Tass that some of its AI chatbot features were temporarily unavailable, and its smart home devices may also face issues.
Yandex had previously said its Kaluga data centre was one of Russia’s largest, spanning 130,000 sqm (1,399,000 sq ft) and using as much electricity each year as 220,000 UK households.
Its Sasovo data centre, meanwhile, contains two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company’s AI model. It is not known whether the supercomputers survived the attack.
Ukraine’s defence ministry confirmed the data centre strikes, saying they could "force Russia to divert resources to repair the damaged capacity".
Zelensky said Kyiv was responding to similar Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres in a "mirror-like fashion".
As a result of the strikes, about 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding region lost internet access.
Some Ukrainian companies have already started transferring data from damaged servers to facilities abroad.
Moscow has defended the attacks by saying the data centres were being used by Ukrainian military intelligence.
Ukraine, however, accuses Russia of deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure. Russia has increased strikes on energy infrastructure ahead of winter, as it has in previous years of the full-scale invasion that began in 2022.