Damage up to 30 billion rubles: strikes on Yandex data centers paralyze Runet
Three Yandex data centers have been shut down after drone attacks; damage could reach 30 billion rubles, and outages have affected Runet and services in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Serbia.
Yandex's damage from drone attacks on data centers could reach 30 billion rubles — this estimate was given by Eldar Murtazin, leading analyst at Mobile Research Group. After strikes on facilities in Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir, three of the company's data centers have been shut down, and outages have affected the entire Runet and services in four neighboring countries.
On the night of October 11, drones attacked Yandex's third data center — in Vladimir. In the morning, the company reported a major outage and disruption of power supply at the facility. Service problems were recorded by users from various regions of Russia, and disruptions to Yandex Taxi — also in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Serbia.
"Taxi drivers' app doesn't work. They can't even log into their accounts, and those who weren't kicked out of the app have disrupted navigation. Passengers, if they call a taxi, can only pay in cash," one of the drivers told the ASTRA channel.
What happened to the infrastructure?
The first attack hit Sasovo on October 8: a fire completely halted the data center's operations, and in the evening Yandex admitted that the facility might not be recoverable. On October 9, the company reported damage to a second data center in Kaluga.
"Several modules of the data center are completely disabled. Because of this, some Yandex services may operate with disruptions. The full extent of the damage is currently being assessed," the company's press service stated.
The Sasovo facility has been operating since 2014, its capacity is estimated at approximately 12 MW, and the number of servers could have reached 30–40 thousand. The key loss is two of the company's three supercomputers: Chervonenkis and Lyapunov. They trained neural networks, including YandexGPT, and were built partly on NVIDIA A100 accelerators. In 2021, Chervonenkis ranked 19th in the global TOP500 ranking.
How much does recovery cost?
According to Murtazin's assessment, there is simply nothing to replace the supercomputers with. "If approximately everything burned down, the damage could amount to up to 30 billion rubles. Especially given that these were some of the most powerful supercomputers in Russia. If it comes to building new capacities, that will take years," the expert explained to Fontanka.
Industry calculations confirm the scale: construction of a modern data center costs 0.8–1.5 billion rubles per megawatt. For a facility of Sasovo's scale, comparable infrastructure would cost 18–30 billion rubles excluding server and accelerator replacement.
Who else was affected?
Third-party organizations operate through Yandex's infrastructure, so the outage spread to:
- Gosuslugi, RZD, CIAN, Avito, VKontakte, Astral, Twinby;
- Yandex's full stack — from Mail and Disk to Yandex Cloud and advertising tools;
- Foreign services: marketplace Uzum Market and Yandex Delivery in Uzbekistan.
Users reported delays in Alice responses, malfunctions of Station speakers, and Smart Home outages — the system stopped responding to water leaks, smoke, and motion sensors.
What's happening with the market?
Leonid Yuldashev, coordinator of eQualitie projects, assessed the scenario directly on the air of Nastoyashchee Vremya: "Yandex has 6 data centers in Russia. They left Finland. Six such attacks and Yandex will be left without infrastructure."
Yandex has already reached agreements with VK Cloud, Selectel, and K2Cloud on accelerated data placement for affected clients. Partners allocated additional teams and offered flexible financial terms, but infrastructure migration does not guarantee data recovery in the absence of backups.
The cost of digital services will rise: data center owners will have to spend more on physical protection, backup facilities, and insurance. Russian hosting has already risen in price by more than 30% amid VAT increases and SORM installation requirements.
What's next?
The Russian data center market is geographically concentrated: according to IPG Estate's 2025 study, 76% of rack spaces are in Moscow, 9.3% in St. Petersburg, and only 14.8% in other regions. Laws on sovereign Runet and data "landing" deprive Russian companies of external reserves.
Experts predict: if attacks continue, Moscow will be forced to reconsider bans, and businesses will massively move data abroad. The main beneficiary could be Kazakhstan with its "Data Center Valley" project in Ekibastuz: up to 1 GW of power capacity on 1,300 hectares by 2027 and partnership with NVIDIA. The window of opportunity is limited — backup facilities need to be built now.
Original: forbes.ru
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