Drones hit a data center owned by Russia's Yandex, the country's leading AI and technology company said on Thursday, in the first major attack on a Russian data hub since the start of the war with Ukraine.
Yandex later Thursday said it could not yet determine whether equipment at the center could be restored.
Mutual drone attacks by Russia and Ukraine this year have gradually spread across the economy, from energy facilities and refineries to ports and vessels carrying oil and grain, e-commerce warehouses and, most recently, data centers.
Russia has conducted a strike campaign on Ukrainian data centers and telecommunications infrastructure over the past month, including targets in central Kyiv.
Yandex said the attack on its Sasovo hub, one of its five large data centers, caused a fire and forced it to suspend operations at the site, which hosts tens of thousands of servers.
The company, often dubbed "Russia's Google," said its core consumer services were not affected, but did not describe the extent of the damage.
"The scale of the damage to the infrastructure is still being assessed," Yandex said in a statement later on Thursday. "For the moment, we cannot confirm whether it is possible to restore the data center equipment in Sasovo."
On the website of its Yandex Cloud service, the company advised customers there were problems with the electricity supply to one data center "zone" and recommended using others.
Yandex said in 2021 that the Sasovo hub hosted two of its three supercomputers built around Nvidia A100 chips, which it uses to train its YandexGPT large AI model. Yandex declined to say whether the supercomputers were affected by the attack.
Multiple online services in Russia reported technical issues on Thursday, including real estate aggregator Cian, a book portal called Litmarket, and the websites of Russian Railways and professional football club Spartak Moscow.
A state-owned bus company in the Moscow region said online ticket sales were currently unavailable due to the "temporary shutdown of a data center."
Online monitoring service Detector404 said it had received 58,268 user complaints over the past day. Yandex shares at the Moscow Exchange, where it is a proxy stock for the Russian technology sector, were down 3%.
Previous Ukrainian attacks on Russia have led to fuel shortages and queues at petrol stations, losses for tens of thousands of small businesses involved in e-commerce, and higher inflation as rising fuel costs feed through to consumer prices.
Critically important infrastructure
Russian President Vladimir Putin in August gave the state the power to take control of critically important infrastructure if it is deemed to be poorly protected from drone attacks.
There were previously no confirmed major Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian data centers.
Russia's RBC news outlet reported on Thursday, quoting sources, that businesses were in talks with the government on developing data centers in countries deemed "friendly" by Moscow.
Some Ukrainian data centers were forced to suspend operations after sustaining damage, while 100,000 households suffered temporary internet outages after one attack.
Ukraine's digital minister told Reuters last month that the country was moving digital infrastructure underground in response to Russian attacks.
Yandex, which created Russia's first search engine in 1997 and is one of the few major Russian companies not under Western sanctions, runs YandexGPT, one of Russia's leading AI models, as well as a cloud computing service and a range of other consumer products, including Yandex Taxi and Yandex Music.
Sberbank, Yandex's main domestic competitor, which is developing the rival GigaChat model, says Russian AI developers lag their U.S. and Chinese counterparts by six to nine months, with difficulties in importing advanced chips due to sanctions seen as the main bottleneck.