Russian internet giant Yandex says one of its cloud availability zones has been knocked offline after a drone attack caused a fire at its data center in Sasovo, a town roughly 300 kilometers southeast of Moscow. Yandex, which dominates Russia’s search, email, and mapping markets, also runs a cloud computing arm that lists the affected zone as ru-central1-b on its status page.
According to Yandex’s own incident notes, the fire “affected part of the Yandex Cloud infrastructure” and “data center operations have been completely halted.” The company has told customers to pursue “alternative service restoration plans,” including shifting to its bare metal server offerings, and warned that restoring service at the Sasovo site “will not be possible in the near future.”
Reuters reports that Yandex is uncertain whether the facility can be brought back online at all. In an update, Yandex confirmed that a second data center has since been struck as well, suggesting a broader campaign against Russian digital infrastructure rather than an isolated incident.
Yandex has not identified who carried out the attack, but Ukrainian media report that President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Russia has struck Ukrainian data centers and that his government responds in kind.
A pattern of infrastructure as a target
If Yandex is ultimately forced to write off the Sasovo facility, it would mark the second cloud provider this year to lose a data center outright to drone attack. Earlier in 2026, AWS concluded its Bahrain facility could not be recovered after an Iranian drone strike, reportedly carried out because Iran believed the site hosted US military and defense supplier workloads.
Industry executives have long warned that data centers, as critical infrastructure, are increasingly likely targets in active conflicts, whether through direct strikes or attacks on the power and network links that feed them.
What it means for resilience planning
The standard advice for resilience, spreading workloads across multiple geographically dispersed availability zones and even multiple cloud providers, is harder to apply inside Russia. Sanctions have largely cut Russian businesses off from international cloud providers, leaving a smaller domestic pool of operators and fewer options for genuine geographic redundancy.
For hosting professionals elsewhere, the incident is a reminder that physical security and geopolitical risk are becoming real factors in data center site selection and multi-region architecture decisions, not just theoretical concerns.