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Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex. The damage has left Yandex, known as “Russia’s Google” because it operates the country’s most popular search engine, struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services. The Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8 and October 9, according to Reuters. Those actions came as a direct response to a Russian drone strike campaign targeting Ukraine’s data centers, which has disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of Ukrainians since late September. “We continue to respond to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, and we’re doing so with high precision,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a post on X. “Another data center was hit as well—our symmetrical response.” The Ukrainian company Firepoint said its FP-1 one-way attack drones were involved in the latest strike on the Kaluga data center that is Yandex’s largest such facility, Reuters reported. The first Ukrainian attack targeted Yandex’s Sasovo data center that houses two of the company’s three supercomputers used for training the company’s YandexGPT AI model. Yandex said no employees were hurt but acknowledged disruptions to some services. Russian users reported problems accessing media websites and popular apps for the Ivi video streaming platform, the digital banking service T-Bank and the state-owned Russian Railways, according to the independent Russian news publication Meduza.
document fetched 2026-10-10 02:49 · canonical https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/ukraines-drones-knock-out-ai-data-center-belonging-to-russias-google