Russia's largest Yandex data center reportedly hit in drone attack
on Google
A major Yandex data center in Russia's Ryazan Oblast was reportedly damaged in an overnight drone attack, with a large fire reported at the industrial site.
OSINT groups Exilenova+ and ASTRA identified the site as Yandex DC Sasovo, located in the city of Sasovo. Yandex describes the facility as its largest data center, supporting the company's services and cloud infrastructure.
Yandex Cloud later acknowledged an "incident" and power-supply problems in its “ru-central1-b availability zone”. According to company updates, disruptions began at around 1:31 a.m., and roughly 40 minutes later the situation had not yet stabilized.
Yandex warned that the outage could affect other parts of its cloud network and advised customers to move some services elsewhere while engineers worked to restore operations.
The company did not publicly link the incident to the reported drone attack.
Exilenova+ also reported disruptions affecting some Yandex services following the strike. Public outage monitors, however, did not show evidence of a widespread outage across Yandex's main consumer services.
The Sasovo data center is located on the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant, a manufacturer of metal-cutting and high-precision CNC metalworking machines used across Russian industry, including the defense-industrial, aerospace, oil and gas, and heavy machinery sectors.
Sasta says its production complex includes machining and assembly workshops, a foundry, and research and development facilities, and that its equipment is used by enterprises in Russia's defense industry.
The plant has been under U.K. sanctions since 2024 over its role in Russia's defense sector.
It remains unclear whether the Yandex data center, the Sasta plant, or both were the intended targets of the reported attack.
In 2022, Ryazan Governor Pavel Malkov described the Sasovo complex as a high-tech facility housing tens of thousands of servers used to rapidly process requests across Yandex services.
Neither regional authorities nor Ukraine's military had publicly confirmed the reported strike at the time of publication. Yandex acknowledged the infrastructure incident and power problems but did not say what caused them.
