Drone strikes hit three major data centers in Russia — leaving 20-petaflop supercomputers damaged and data permanently lost | Daily Reports Online
- Yandex says it recovered 97.16% of customer data affected by Ukrainian drone strikes
- Equipment damage and missing backups left 2.84% of customer data unrecoverable
- Ukrainian drones targeted Yandex’s three supercomputers
Yandex has recovered 97.16% of customer data affected by Ukrainian drone strikes against its Russian data centers, although some information remains permanently inaccessible.
The Russian technology giant confirmed that the remaining 2.84% could not be restored due to equipment damage and the absence of backup copies.
Customers who had activated its backup tools before the incidents retained their information, with no losses reported among those accounts.
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Three-day attacks hit at least three Yandex facilities
The attacks began on October 8 2026, when Ukrainian drones struck a Yandex facility in Sasovo, located within Russia’s Ryazan region.
This site, operating since 2014, housed two of the company’s three supercomputers, Chervonenkis and Lyapunov, with respective peak capacities of 29.42 and 20.03 petaflops.
Further strikes the next day hit Yandex installation at Grabtsevo industrial park in Russia’s Kaluga region, which it describes as its largest computing facility and among Russia’s biggest installations for commercial data processing and storage.
Another attack followed on October 11, when Ukrainian drones struck a facility in Vladimir housing Galushkin, the company’s third supercomputer.
Galushkin has a maximum performance of 20.64 petaflops, adding another significant computing asset to the facilities affected during the three days.
The company has not disclosed how the lost customer information was distributed across the affected facilities or how many customers were involved.
In total, about five data centers belonging to Yandex, Sberbank, and VK were struck across Russia in October 2026.
Yandex changes its backup arrangements
Following the incidents, Yandex announced that backup protection would become active automatically whenever customers create new virtual machines through its cloud platform.
Customers can still switch off the feature through the management console, meaning the new default does not make backup protection compulsory.
The company also introduced another availability zone, identified as ru-central1-f, operating from a separate physical location to provide additional service continuity.
The new zone adds another location for hosting workloads, although the announcement does not establish that it can replace information already lost.
The incidents have also prompted some Russian businesses to examine hosting arrangements outside the country, particularly in neighboring Kazakhstan.
Yevgeny Svidersky, vice president of cloud services at ITGlobal.com, told Kommersant that interest in Kazakh facilities had increased.
Two other industry sources claim that certain companies had already started moving operations to facilities beyond Russia’s borders.
Those sources linked the decisions to concerns about further damage to domestic computing infrastructure and possible interruptions to business services.
However, there is no mention of the specific companies involved, the volume of data or infrastructure being transferred, or whether the move represents a permanent relocation.
Via United24media
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