Ukrainian OSINT analyst: Russia’s Yandex data center in Sasovo burned out inside, though its roof shows almost no significant holes

On 22 October, a Ukrainian OSINT analyst named Harbuz reported that Yandex's data center in Sasovo had burned out from the inside, despite showing almost no significant damage on its roof in cloud-free satellite images. Ukrainian drones had struck the site overnight on 8 October, marking the first attack on a Russian data center.

This incident occurred two weeks after Russia had destroyed data centers in Kyiv. Subsequent strikes hit Yandex sites in Vladimir and Kaluga, as well as Sber and VK data centers near St. Petersburg. In occupied Donbas, monitoring channels reported hits on buildings housing telecom operators.

Harbuz, who runs the Ukrainian OSINT channel Dnipro Osint, based his observations on available information, including fire damage inside the data center. He claimed that a third of the facility had burned out, although the extent of the damage from the blackened western roof varied among different reports. Russian outlet Agentstvo, based on Airbus images from 12 October, found damage on about a third of the building, describing a blackened western roof with damage resembling holes.

Yandex acknowledged the attack, stating that it caused a fire and led to the suspension of operations at the site. The company hosts tens of thousands of servers on its facilities, including its cloud and document services. Following the attack, Yandex reported that the scale of the damage to its infrastructure was still being assessed and that it could not confirm whether it would be possible to restore the data center equipment in Sasovo. The facility houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers used for developing its AI model.