Drones Hit Yandex Data Center in Vladimir, Russia, Disrupting Over 80 Services

A Ukrainian drone strike early Sunday, Oct. 11, hit Yandex’s data center in Vladimir, Russia, forcing the facility to suspend operations and disrupting more than 80 digital services and cloud components. The targeted site is a 40–50 megawatt complex in the Energetik district designed to hold up to 2,880 server racks. Yandex confirmed the Vladimir center was halted, with outages cascading beyond its apps to include Alice, Yandex Music, Telemost, and Yandex Smart Home, as well as databases and developer and AI services such as the YandexGPT API, SpeechKit and Vision OCR. Reports also cited failures in banking, ride-hailing, and retailers like Magnit and Fix Price. Vladimir Region Governor Aleksandr Avdeev said strikes damaged local electrical substations and crews restored about 80% of power and utilities by Sunday morning. The Russian Defense Ministry said it intercepted 479 drones across 16 regions overnight. The attack follows earlier Yandex strikes in Sasovo (Oct. 8) and Kaluga (Oct. 9).