Drone attack ignites fire at Yandex data center in Sasovo, Russia

A drone attack on October 8 triggered a fire at Yandex's data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Region, according to the company's statement. The data center, operational since 2014, occupies part of the premises of the Sasta metalworking machine tool factory. The facility provides infrastructure for Yandex Cloud services, including computing power, storage, databases, Kubernetes, security systems, and monitoring.

The attack caused widespread service disruptions. Power supply failures affected multiple Yandex services and a range of Russian internet services hosted at the facility, including the auto-posting platform Postmypost and regional editions of Komsomolskaya Pravya. However, Yandex stated that its main services continued operating in normal mode, though some services became unavailable to users. The data center's operations were fully suspended following the incident.

Yandex confirmed there were no casualties. The company stated that relevant services were working on-site to address the aftermath and restore affected services. The situation was reported as under control.

The facility is located at the Sasta factory, which specializes in producing computer numerical control (CNC) metalworking machine tools. According to sources, Sasta's equipment is used in defense, aerospace, transportation, and heavy industry applications in Russia, and the company previously supplied specialized machine tools to Roscosmos enterprises. Sasta operates under international sanctions imposed by Canada, Switzerland, the EU, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Japan.