Yandex says drone strike caused fire that halted its Sasovo data center in Russia

Yandex has stopped all operations at its data center in Sasovo, in Russia's Ryazan Oblast, after a drone strike on Thursday, the company said in a statement to CNBC. According to Yandex, the strike started a fire and affected part of its infrastructure, and some of its services may be unavailable to users. Yandex also told CNBC that there were no casualties and that emergency services were at the site. CNBC reported that the company said its core services were unaffected.

DCD, citing the Kyiv Independent, reported that the facility is Yandex DC Sasovo and that it is the company's largest data center facility, an identification made by the OSINT specialists Exilenova+ and ASTRA. According to DCD, the data center is part of the Sasta production complex, a site with a foundry, R&D facilities and machinery and assembly workshops that serves the Russian defence industry, among others.

On the cloud side, DCD reported that the Yandex Cloud status dashboard lists a power outage in the ru-central-b availability zone, with disruptions that started at 1:31am local time and were still continuing at the time of its report. According to DCD, Yandex runs five large data centers in Russia, in Vladimir, Sasovo, Ivanteevka, Mytishchi and in Kaluga Oblast. The publication added that in April 2025 the company's Moscow cloud region went down following an incident involving the substation that supplied it.

DCD described Sasovo as the first major data center in Russia to be taken offline during the conflict with Ukraine. The publication noted that several data centers in Ukraine have also been damaged by drones during the war, including several in recent weeks, at sites run by Datagroup, Ukrtelecom, Vodafone Ukraine, MiroHost, De Novo, Parkovyi Data Center, Cosmonova and Omega Telecom. DCD said it was not known whether these are all separate locations or whether some companies shared facilities.

CNBC reported that Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attack on the Yandex facility, and said Ukraine has increased strikes on Russian infrastructure such as oil refineries in recent months, while Russia has carried out air strikes on Ukraine's power grid. According to CNBC, Yandex is based in Moscow, provides Russia's most widely used search engine and developed the generative AI model YandexGPT. DCD recalled that Yandex was previously owned by a holding company based in the Netherlands, which split its European and Russian operations and fully divested Yandex in February 2024; the European business now operates as Nebius, a neocloud.