Ukrainian drones strike Yandex's Kaluga data center: Multiple modules taken offline

Second strike in two days

Ukrainian drones struck a Yandex data center in the Russian city of Kaluga, hot on the heels of an attack on a Yandex facility in Sasovo that caused a major outage.

Russian state news agency TASS said that "several modules of the Yandex data center in Kaluga have been completely taken out of operation as a result of a UAV attack."

The scale of the facility

Located in the Grabtsevo industrial park, the site was designed to be the largest Yandex data center in all of Russia. It entered service in the second half of 2023 and covers roughly 130,000 square meters.

With a 63-megawatt power capacity and more than 3,800 server racks, the complex was built to let Yandex expand its cloud offering. It is not yet clear how the strike is affecting everyday Russians, but the earlier Sasovo attack also impacted Yandex Cloud, with users reporting problems on Yandex Mail, Disk, Documents, Pay and Market.

Digital infrastructure under fire

The incident is the latest in a run of attacks on digital infrastructure in both Russia and Ukraine. Earlier this month, Russian missiles struck a Ukrainian facility, taking the world's second-largest torrent tracker offline.