Drones struck a Yandex data center in Vladimir, 180 km east of Moscow, early on Oct. 11, the third of the Russian internet company’s five large data centers hit in four days, Data Center Dynamics reported. A fire at Yandex’s Sasovo facility in Ryazan Region on Oct. 8 took the site offline and disabled servers used by Russian Railways, MegaFon and several national media. On Oct. 9, drones reportedly hit Yandex’s Kaluga center. Yandex said operations at Vladimir “were halted,” that no one was hurt, and that users’ money and account records are safe. More than 80 Yandex Cloud services went down, among them computing, databases, the YandexGPT API, the Alice voice assistant, Yandex Music, banking apps, ride-hailing, and the retail chains Magnit and Fix Price which run on its cloud. A local official said two substations were knocked out, leaving about 5,000 residents without power. Yandex removed the locations of its data centers in four regions from its own maps after the first strike.

Kiev has not formally claimed the attacks, but Ukrainian military analysts told the Kyiv Post that the aim is to disrupt Russian state logistics and “digital command-and-control.” Russia has hit Ukrainian data centers throughout the war, several in recent weeks. The Vladimir strike came hours before President Trump announced an “energy ceasefire,” and the night after Kiev’s drones hit the Novoshakhtinsk oil terminal. Data centers are now routine military targets.