Ukraine Attacks "Yandex" for the First Time
The strike was carried out on the data center where two of the company's supercomputers are located.
Ukraine strikes "Yandex" for the first time
On the night of October 8, a major fire broke out at the "Yandex" company's data center in the city of Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, as a result of a Ukrainian drone attack.
The company confirmed that an "incident" had occurred on the territory of the data center, affecting the operation of services, and warned that some services might temporarily be unavailable because of this.
The fire was extinguished in the morning, and there were no casualties. The operation of the data center has been restored.
Users have already begun complaining about disruptions in "Yandex" services. In particular, problems are reportedly being observed with the main Yandex Cloud service, as well as "Yandex.Disk" and "Yandex.Documents" linked to it.
According to Moscow Exchange data, against the backdrop of the strike, the share price of "Yandex," considered one of the leading IT companies in Russia, fell by more than 3 percent.
The strike was carried out on the territory of the "Sasta" machine tool plant. The administration of the Ryazan Oblast, without mentioning the name of the plant, reported that "the roof of one of the enterprises caught fire" after the Ukrainian attack.
The "Sasta" plant produces pipe-cutting machines. The enterprise's products are exported and also supplied to machine-building enterprises in Russia. According to the Astra publication, "Sasta" also provides defense enterprises' production bases with its products. The plant has been included in sanctions lists by a number of Western countries.
The "Yandex" data center has been operating in one of the former buildings of "Sasta" since 2014. In September, employees of the center appeared in a video showing them working specifically in Sasovo.
Two of the company's three supercomputers used for training neural networks are located in the Sasovo center. These are the "Lyapunov" and "Chervonenkis" supercomputers. According to the T-Invariant publication, "Chervonenkis" is the most productive among the company's supercomputers. In 2021, it was ranked 19th among the Top-500 supercomputers in the world. However, it later fell into the second hundred of the ranking due to difficulties in updating infrastructure caused by sanctions.