Ukrainian drone strikes on October 8 and 9 damaged two of five data centers operated by Yandex, the Russian search engine and tech company often called "Russia's Google." The attacks disabled infrastructure supporting Yandex's AI services and triggered cascading outages across Russian internet services.
The first strike targeted Yandex's Sasovo data center, which houses two of the company's three supercomputers used to train YandexGPT, the company's AI chatbot. The second strike hit Yandex's largest facility in Kaluga. Firepoint, a Ukrainian company, said its FP-1 drones were involved in the Kaluga attack, according to Reuters.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy framed the strikes as retaliation. "We continue to respond to Russia's attacks on Ukraine, and we're doing so with high precision," Zelenskyy posted on X, calling the action a "symmetrical response."
The damage cascaded beyond Yandex itself. Russian users reported service disruptions affecting the Ivi video streaming platform, T-Bank digital banking, Russian Railways, a dating app, real estate aggregator, self-publishing platform and the website of a professional soccer club, according to Meduza and Reuters. Yandex acknowledged service disruptions but said no employees were injured.
The strikes follow a Russian drone campaign targeting Ukraine's data centers since late September, which disrupted mobile and internet services for thousands of Ukrainians. Ukraine has recently escalated its own drone strike operations against Russian targets, including military bases, energy infrastructure and shipping in the Black Sea.
Data centers have emerged as wartime targets in the broader conflict. After US and Israeli forces attacked Iran in February, Iranian drones damaged multiple Amazon data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Ukraine faces constraints in its air defense capabilities due to a shortage of interceptor weapons for Russian missiles and jet-powered drones, but has gradually expanded medium-range and long-range drone operations. Earlier in 2026, Ukraine targeted warehouses belonging to Wildberries and Ozon, Russian e-commerce equivalents to Amazon.
In a sign of escalation, coordinated drone strikes sank two commercial ships on October 5 and 6 in the exclusive economic zones of NATO members Romania and Bulgaria. Zelenskyy attributed those attacks to Russia.