Drones hit Yandex data center in first major attack on Russian data hub

Drones hit a major data center in Russia’s Ryazan region owned by ⁠the country’s leading artificial intelligence and technology company, Yandex, the company said Thursday.

It added that the attack caused ⁠a fire and ​forced ⁠the company to fully suspend the center’s operations. The ⁠company said it was dealing with ​the ⁠consequences and restoring ‌affected services.

The company said that its core consumer services were not affected. ‌Yandex runs YandexGPT, one ‌of Russia’s leading generative AI models.

The attack on the Yandex data center ⁠followed a wave of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers in recent weeks. Previously there were no confirmed major Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian data centers.

On the website ‌of its Yandex Cloud ​service, the company said there ‌were problems with ⁠the electricity supply at ⁠one data center “zone” and recommended customers use ‌other zones.