Second drone strike in 48 hours takes out modules at Yandex's largest data center

A drone strike has taken several modules at Yandex's data center in Russia's Kaluga region completely out of service, according to Russian state media — the second time in 48 hours that one of the company's data centers has been hit.

What happened

United24 Media reported on October 9 that a UAV attack had struck the Yandex data center in Kaluga, citing the Russian state news agency TASS. According to TASS, the company itself said several modules at the site had been completely taken out of operation.

The facility sits in the Grabtsevo industrial park and was designed as Yandex's largest data center in Russia. Construction began in 2022, and the site entered operation in the second half of 2023.

The second hit in two days

United24 Media described the Kaluga strike as the second attack on a Yandex data center within 48 hours. It previously reported that satellite imagery had shown the extent of the damage at a Yandex-operated facility in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, after what it described as a Ukrainian drone strike.

The reports did not detail the effect on customer-facing services, and coverage of the Kaluga incident rests on a state news agency citing the affected company, so independently confirmed details remain limited for now.

Inside the Kaluga facility

According to United24 Media, the complex spans roughly 130,000 square meters with a planned power capacity of 63 megawatts — around 50% more than some of Yandex's other major data centers. It was built to house more than 3,800 server racks, each designed for loads of up to 15 kilowatts.

The site supports Yandex's internal services and was also intended to expand Yandex Cloud, including the rollout of the company's fourth availability zone.

Why it matters

Cloud platforms sell redundancy, and availability zones are the unit they sell it in. The Kaluga site was built specifically to anchor Yandex Cloud's fourth zone, so damage serious enough to take whole modules offline raises immediate questions about how much of that zone still functions and whether customer workloads can fail over cleanly.

The incident also changes the risk profile of physical infrastructure. Data centers are normally engineered against power failure, cooling faults and fire — not munitions. Two strikes on the same operator's facilities within 48 hours, if the reports hold, turn physical attack into a live operational risk for cloud services in the region rather than a theoretical one.

Finally, there is an information-quality problem. The primary source here is a state-controlled outlet quoting the affected company, relayed by a Ukrainian publication. The basic facts — that a strike occurred and that modules are down — may well be accurate, but the scope of the damage, any service disruption and a recovery timeline are likely to stay uncertain until independent verification or fresh satellite imagery emerges.