Ukrainian Drones Strike Russia’s Largest Yandex Data Center

Ukrainian drones are said to have struck Yandex’s large data center in the Russian city of Kaluga. The strike caused serious damage to the complex and put several of its modules completely out of operation. It has not yet been confirmed whether this facility was the intended target of the attack.

The data center is located in the Grabtsevo Industrial Park in Kaluga. It is considered Yandex’s largest data center in Russia. The complex opened in the second half of 2023. It has a total area of 130,000 square meters and houses a large number of servers.

The facility has a power capacity of 63 MW. This is approximately 50 percent more than some of Yandex’s other data centers. The complex has more than 3,800 server racks. The center was built for the company’s internal services and to expand the Yandex Cloud system.

The extent to which the attack affected ordinary users is not yet known. An earlier strike on another Yandex data center in Sasovo caused problems with the Yandex Cloud service. At the time, users reported disruptions to Yandex Mail, Disk, Documents, Pay and Market.

During the previous incident, the company said its main services continued to operate. The latest strike in Kaluga comes amid ongoing attacks on digital infrastructure in Russia and Ukraine. Earlier this month, Russian missiles struck a facility in Ukraine. As a result, the world’s 2nd-largest platform for tracking torrent files stopped operating.