Yandex had two data centers hit by Ukrainian drones in less than 48 hours, compromising part of its technology infrastructure in Russia. The second attack occurred this Friday (9), in the Kaluga region, where several modules became completely inoperable. On Thursday (8), another offensive had interrupted operations at the Sasovo facility, which houses two of the three supercomputers used by the company in artificial intelligence development.
According to Reuters, two of Yandex's five data processing facilities have already been hit. The company said it is working to restore affected services, but has not yet been able to determine the full extent of the damage or establish a timeline for recovering the equipment.
In Kaluga, Yandex warned of possible disruptions to its platforms, used by millions of people and companies. No one was injured in the attack. In Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, the offensive caused a fire and halted a facility that houses tens of thousands of servers.
Sasovo facility houses two supercomputers equipped with Nvidia A100
The center hit on Thursday has a specific role in Yandex's artificial intelligence infrastructure. According to documentation released by the company in 2021, the facility houses the Chervonenkis and Lyapunov supercomputers, while the third piece of equipment, Galushkin, is in the Vladimir region.
The systems were built with AMD EPYC processors and Nvidia A100 graphics accelerators, developed for machine learning tasks. In the configuration announced in 2021, Chervonenkis and Lyapunov had 2,688 A100 GPUs, used in intensive processing operations and AI model training.
Despite the shutdown of the facility, there is no confirmation that the supercomputers were damaged. Yandex did not clarify whether the equipment was directly hit, and the assessment of the possibility of recovering the entire infrastructure is still ongoing.
The incidents occur amid the expansion of attacks against technology infrastructure in the war between Russia and Ukraine. On Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that his country was responding to Russian offensives against Ukrainian data centers, without detailing the targets of the operations.
Yandex keeps teams mobilized to restore interrupted services. As of this Friday, the company had not released a definitive tally of the losses at the two facilities.
