Ukraine's drone strikes on Yandex, Sber and VK data centres disrupt Russia

A wave of Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian data centres this month has disrupted everyday life in Russia — from card payments and taxi apps to digital door keys and court hearings — and damaged supercomputers that Russia relies on to develop artificial intelligence. Five facilities run by Yandex, Sber and VKontakte, three of the companies at the heart of Russia's consumer internet, were hit between October 7 and 18.

The strikes

Date (October 2026)	Target	Location
7–8 (reports differ)	Yandex data centre	Sasovo, Ryazan region
9	Yandex data centre	Kaluga
11	Yandex data centre	Vladimir
14	Sber data centre and AI hub	Balakovo, Saratov region
18	VKontakte data centre	Leningrad region, near St Petersburg

Satellite images show serious fire damage at the Yandex sites. Yandex runs six data centres and had planned for losing one, but three were hit in four days. The company said on October 9 that no employees were hurt and that it was restoring services; it later said most key cloud services were back within days after being moved to other sites. None of the three companies has disclosed the scale of the damage, and Sber and VK said their systems kept running without major disruption.

What stopped working

The outages reached ordinary Russians quickly. Users reported problems with:

• Money: Yandex Pay and some card payments failed; one St Petersburg resident said she could not reach her savings for four days and could not pay rent or buy food. Taxi drivers said they could not see or withdraw their earnings.
• Homes: Some residents could not get into their buildings when digital keys and entry systems linked to Yandex went offline, and smart-home voice assistants stopped responding.
• Transport and shopping: Yandex Taxi showed errors or sent several cars to one customer; food deliveries and Yandex Market orders failed; maps and cloud storage went down.
• Courts: Arbitration courts reportedly cancelled or postponed hearings after losing access to their databases.

The AI blow

Yandex's three supercomputers, which train its AI models and power the Alisa assistant, ranked among the world's 500 fastest. The Sasovo machine, which housed two of them and was once 19th in the world, is reported to have fallen out of the top 100. The computers run on Nvidia A100 chips that Russia cannot legally import, and soot from fires is highly damaging to electronics. Mikhail Klimarev, head of Russia's Internet Protection Society, said repairs could take months or years and that the attacks put Russia far behind in the AI race. Analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations said the strikes would likely delay Russian AI work further.

Background: a war on servers

Russia's "sovereign internet" rules require companies to keep data on servers inside the country, concentrating it in a few large sites. Nick Reiners of Eurasia Group said that makes them easier to disable, and that Russia lacks the air defences to cover its vast territory. Ukraine, by contrast, moved most of its critical data to servers in European countries after Russian missiles hit Kyiv data facilities in 2022.

Moscow has also targeted Ukraine's digital infrastructure. A Russian strike on October 19 destroyed one of Datagroup's largest facilities in Kyiv, and the city's GigaCenter was damaged the next day. President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of trying to leave Ukrainians without internet and said Ukraine was responding in kind.

Reactions in Moscow

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was too early to discuss state support for Yandex, which he said was "facing difficulties". Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev said the authorities were looking at how to protect data centres after what he called an unprecedented attack.

Why it matters

The campaign marks a new front in the war: alongside refineries and power plants, the servers that run banking, transport and AI are now targets on both sides. For Russia, the damage is hard to fix under sanctions; Klimarev suggested firms may even move computing abroad and the authorities may have to relax internet controls. For the wider world, it is a warning about how much modern life depends on a few buildings full of computers — a risk also seen this month when drones hit cloud data centres in the Gulf.

What happens next

Russian officials are drawing up new protection measures for data centres, while Ukraine has given no sign of stopping. With winter approaching and both sides striking energy and digital infrastructure, further outages in both countries are likely.