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Ukraine strikes Yandex data center housing two of the company’s supercomputers

Source: Meduza

A Ukrainian drone attack started a fire at a Yandex data center in the town of Sasovo, Ryazan region. No one was injured, but the data center has completely halted operations.

Yandex has warned that some of its services may be unavailable, and users are already complaining about outages at Yandex. Problems are also reported to be affecting Yandex’s main service, Yandex Cloud, as well as the Yandex Disk and Yandex Documents services that depend on it. Outages are also hitting the websites of Cian, Russian Railways, and the administrations of several regions.

Shares of Yandex, one of Russia’s leading IT companies, fell more than 3% amid the strike, according to data from the Moscow Exchange.

The strike hit the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant. Ryazan region authorities did not name the plant, saying only that the roof of “one of the enterprises” caught fire after the Ukrainian attack.

Sasta manufactures pipe-threading machines, and its products are shipped for export and to machine-building plants across Russia. Sasta also provides a production base for defense enterprises, the independent Telegram channel Astra explains. The plant is on the sanctions lists of several Western countries.

Yandex’s data center has occupied part of Sasta’s former premises since 2014. In September, center employees showed off its equipment and said they work specifically in Sasovo, Ryazan region.

The Sasovo center houses two of Yandex’s three supercomputers, which are used to train neural networks: “Lyapunov” and “Chervonenkis.” Chervonenkis is the company’s most powerful supercomputer, the independent science-focused outlet T-invariant writes. In 2021, it ranked 19th in the world’s Top 500 supercomputer list. It later entered the second hundred of the rankings amid difficulties updating its infrastructure because of sanctions.

Yandex has not yet reported on the condition of the supercomputers after the strike. The third system, “Galushkin,” is located in Vladimir.

It is unclear whether the plant or the data center was the intended target. Ukraine has not officially commented on the strike.

The attack on Yandex’s data center came shortly after Russia began striking similar Ukrainian infrastructure. Since September 23, data centers belonging to at least eight companies have been damaged or destroyed, and Russian forces have attacked some of them more than once. The Russian Defense Ministry claimed the data centers “provide for the processing and transmission of intelligence data in the interests of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”

Many see this as a continuation of Russia’s campaign to pressure Ukraine and its residents and destroy the Ukrainian economy. Russian forces have also struck bridges, gas stations, railroads, shopping centers, and warehouses. In recent weeks, the Russian military has been striking Kyiv almost around the clock.

War in photos. Soldiers from Ukraine’s 141st Brigade on the front line in Dnipropetrovsk region