Drone strike on Yandex's Sasovo data center pushes Yandex Cloud customers to other zones

Yandex's advice to use alternative zones ^[10] assumes a copy of each workload is already running somewhere other than Sasovo, or can be rebuilt there from backups. A service replicated across zones fails over. A service whose only database replica was in the shut-down building has to wait for that building to reopen. I think the advice is correct, but it only helps customers who were paying for a second site before the drones arrived. Tom's Hardware, whose account draws on Reuters and Meduza ^[2], does not say which Yandex Cloud zone Sasovo backs, how many customers ran only there, or when the site will return.

Some of the damage reached companies through their suppliers. RBC reported that RIA Novosti, Vesti and Interfax were down following the attack on an "infrastructure partner" ^[14]. Meduza reported disruptions to corporate systems at T-Bank, Ozon and Wildberries ^[12]. A Moscow-region bus operator suspended online ticket sales, and Detector404 registered 58,268 complaints in 24 hours ^[13].

Replacing lost capacity is the harder problem. The two machines at Sasovo are Chervonenkis and Lyapunov, both built on Nvidia A100s ^[5], and Yandex has used them to train models including YandexGPT ^[8]. Chervonenkis ranked 19th on the Top500 in 2021. Its 21.53 FP64 PFLOPS would now place 101st ^[6]. That is a fall of 82 places with nobody touching the machine ^[21]. Western sanctions mean Yandex can no longer upgrade it ^[7]. A recovery plan that ends with buying replacement servers has no next step here. Tom's Hardware's assessment is that if these machines are damaged, many of their parts may be lost for good, and Yandex would have to train future models on Chinese infrastructure ^[23]. The third machine, Galushkin, is in Vladimir ^[9].

The building's history matters too. Regional authorities reported a fire at an industrial facility after the attack. It is not known whether the intended target was the old Sasta factory or Yandex's computing infrastructure ^[16].

Data centers are being hit on both sides. Russian missiles struck Ukrainian digital infrastructure earlier this month ^[17]. The torrent trackers 1337x and NordicQuality went offline for a time after the servers hosting them were damaged ^[18]. Ukraine is moving some digital infrastructure underground. Russian businesses are discussing deployments in countries Moscow considers friendly ^[19].