Yandex shuts down Vladimir data centre after drone attack, third facility hit in four days
Russia's largest tech company says a drone strike forced a complete shutdown of its Vladimir region data centre, disrupting more than 80 cloud and consumer services
Yandex has completely shut down its data centre in Russia’s Vladimir region following a drone attack. The company announced the closure on October 11, 2026.
It is the third Yandex facility hit in four days.
The strike damaged the site’s infrastructure and sparked a fire. No injuries were reported. The bigger damage was felt downstream, where Yandex Cloud customers and everyday app users found more than 80 services disrupted.
What happened in Vladimir
The attack took place over October 10ā11, 2026. Yandex confirmed infrastructure damage at the site and said the facility was taken fully offline.
Alexander Avdeyev, governor of the Vladimir region, confirmed the drone strike caused a fire. He also said it triggered power outages that temporarily affected around 5,000 local residents.
The Vladimir site has a capacity of 50 megawatts and can hold up to 2,880 server racks.
The disruption hit both business and consumer products. On the cloud side, affected services included computing, storage, databases and AI APIs such as YandexGPT, the company’s large language model. Consumer apps took a hit too. Yandex Music and Go, the company’s taxi service, were among the products affected.
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Three strikes in four days
Vladimir was the latest in a rapid sequence. On October 8, Yandex’s Sasovo data centre in the Ryazan region was completely shut down and caught fire after an attack. A day later, on October 9, the company’s Kaluga facility was partially disabled. Then came Vladimir.
Investors noticed. Yandex shares declined nearly 4% on the Moscow Exchange following the second drone strike.
The attacks unfolded against a much wider aerial backdrop. Russian air defences reportedly intercepted several hundred drones across various regions during this period.
The background: data centres become targets
According to the research findings, the strikes form part of a rapid Ukrainian retaliation against key Russian infrastructure. That retaliation follows earlier Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres in late September and October 2026.
Yandex operates cloud computing, AI applications and a sprawling range of consumer products, from search to music streaming to ride-hailing.
What this means
The share price reaction offers a snapshot of how markets are reading the situation. A decline of nearly 4% after the second strike suggests investors are pricing in geopolitical risk that was previously easier to treat as background noise.
The tit-for-tat pattern described in the research findings, with Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres followed by attacks on Russian ones, signals that digital infrastructure is now treated as fair game in the conflict.