Yandex Cloud limits new resources after reported drone strike shuts a Ryazan data center

Yandex's own account splits the damage in two. The company said it had finished moving workloads to other facilities that were operating normally, though some restrictions remained ^[4]. The restriction it named was capacity. "The ability to create new resources in our cloud infrastructure may currently be limited," the company said ^[5].

One site out of five is 20 percent of Yandex's data centers by count ^[16]. The source does not give capacity per site, so the share of compute lost is not known. Failover carried what was already running ^[4]. A customer whose recovery plan is to rebuild, scale out or add replicas inside Yandex Cloud is drawing on a smaller pool, and Yandex advised customers to move their workloads elsewhere ^[5][6]. Businesses on the platform felt it first. Several Russian websites reportedly went offline, including a social media management platform and the Ryazan edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda ^[9].

Russian accounts of the cause do not line up. State media, citing Yandex, said the Sasovo facility was shut down after the attack ^[1]. Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses intercepted Ukrainian drones over Ryazan and other regions overnight, and local authorities reported no damage ^[17]. Eyewitness photos and videos posted to Telegram appeared to show a fire at the machine-tool plant that houses one of the company's data centers ^[10].

On this record, strikes on Russian data centers amount to one incident with an unclear target. Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers are a declared and sustained campaign. Moscow began hitting them in September, saying the facilities supported Ukraine's armed forces ^[12]. Strikes late last month damaged at least six, including facilities run by MiroHost, Parkovy, Data Group, Utels and Pautina, and also hit Kyivstar and Ukrtelecom infrastructure ^[13]. An attack on September 23 cut fixed-line internet to about 100,000 households in and around Kyiv, according to Ukrainian officials, and some facilities had to shut down completely ^[14].

Kyiv has already written its continuity plan for this. Ukrainian officials say they are moving equipment underground, transferring data to the cloud and relocating some infrastructure abroad ^[15]. Yandex's advice to its customers to move workloads elsewhere is a smaller version of the last step ^[6].