Drones hit a data center of the Russian technology company „Yandex“ in the city of Sasovo, Ryazan region. The attack caused a fire and forced a temporary suspension of work at the site, „Yandex“ reported, quoted by Reuters.
The center in Sasovo is one of the company's five large data centers. It houses tens of thousands of servers. „Yandex“ said it was working to eliminate the consequences and restore the affected services.
„The drone attack caused a fire in the Sasovo data center and affected part of the infrastructure,“ a company spokesman said. According to „Yandex“, there is no change in the operation of the main services for end users, but some of the other services may be temporarily unavailable.
Problems with „Yandex Cloud“
The „Yandex Cloud“ platform has reported power supply problems in one of the data center zones. The company has recommended its customers to use other zones while the affected infrastructure is restored.
No details have been released on the amount of material damage, nor a deadline for the full restoration of the center. It has not been confirmed who carried out the attack.
The incident is the first major attack on a Russian data center since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. It comes after a series of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers in recent weeks.
„Russian Google“
„Yandex“ is one of the leading Russian technology companies and is often referred to as „Russian Google“. It created the first Russian Internet search engine in 1997, developed the „Yandex GPT“ generative artificial intelligence model and offers cloud computing services.
Among its consumer products are „Yandex Taxi“ and „Yandex Music“. The company is one of the few large Russian companies not subject to Western sanctions.
Its main competitor in the Russian market is „Sberbank“, which is developing the „Giga Chat“ model. The bank says Russian AI developers are six to nine months behind their American and Chinese competitors.
Sources: bta.bg, afp.com