Russian search engine Yandex struggles after Ukrainian strikes on data centres

What the report says

Russian technology company Yandex said it is having difficulty keeping some services running after Ukrainian drones hit two of its five data centres over the past two days, according to BBC World News. The firm, often described as Russia’s main search engine provider, also operates widely used food delivery and taxi apps. BBC reported that the company warned customers could see disruptions while engineers worked to restore systems.

The article said Yandex’s Sasovo facility in the Ryazan region was seriously damaged in an overnight attack into Thursday and that operations there were fully suspended. A second site in Kaluga, south-west of Moscow, was also struck on Friday, with part of its infrastructure taken out of service. Yandex said it was hard to predict when the centres would return to normal. It also told state media that some AI chatbot features were temporarily unavailable and that smart home devices might be affected.

BBC said neither Yandex employee injuries nor the full scale of disruption were immediately clear. The company’s data centres are important to the normal running of its services, and one of them reportedly housed supercomputers used to develop its AI model. The article also noted that Ukraine said the strikes were meant to pressure Russia’s war infrastructure, while Moscow has argued that such facilities support Ukrainian military intelligence. The attacks come amid a broader rise in strikes on infrastructure on both sides of the war.