Yandex says a drone strike shut down a third data center, disrupting 80+ services like Yandex Cloud and YandexGPT; users report banking and taxi app outages (Tymur Dubovyk/Kyiv Post)

A Ukrainian drone attack struck a significant Yandex data center in Vladimir, Russia on Sunday morning, causing the facility to shut down operations and disrupting numerous digital services across more than 80 platforms. This marks the third precision strike on Yandex server infrastructure within a four-day period. The facility, capable of housing up to 2,880 server racks, was one of the company's primary processing hubs in Russia.

Following the explosions, Yandex confirmed that the Vladimir data center's operations were halted, triggering a chain reaction of outages in Russian digital infrastructure. Users of Yandex's voice assistant, Yandex Music, videoconferencing tool, Smart Home devices, and enterprise applications hosted on Yandex Cloud experienced extensive outages.

Services such as Compute Cloud, Object Storage, Managed Kubernetes, database management systems, and AI interfaces like YandexGPT API were severely impacted. Third-party commercial platforms in Russia and neighboring countries also faced connectivity failures, with users reporting disruptions in banking, taxi, and retail applications.

Vladimir Region Governor Aleksandr Avdeev reported that the drone strikes damaged local electrical substations, leading to municipal power grid outages, although utility crews managed to restore heat, water, and roughly 80 percent of electrical service by Sunday morning. The Russian Defense Ministry claimed to have intercepted 479 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones across 16 Russian regions, including Vladimir, Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk, and Rostov, as well as occupied Crimea and the Black Sea.

This latest assault follows previous attacks on Yandex facilities on Oct. 8 and Oct. 9, reflecting an escalating campaign targeting Russian digital networks and data-processing logistics.