Source: BBC, Al Jazeera, Cybernews, The Moscow Times

Russian technology company Yandex, sometimes called Russia’s Google, said on October 11 that its data centre in Vladimir, east of Moscow, had been completely shut down following a drone attack. It was the third strike on the company’s facilities in four days, after its Sasovo hub caught fire and closed on October 8 and its Kaluga data centre was partly knocked out on October 9. The company said the rest of its infrastructure was unstable and its cloud platform was in emergency mode, with repairs under way and no casualties reported. The Vladimir site houses one of the supercomputers Yandex uses to train its AI models, and the company has not confirmed whether equipment at Sasovo, which hosts its first two supercomputers, can be repaired at all.

The blast radius

The outages disrupted more than 80 Yandex Cloud services, including computing, storage, databases and AI APIs such as YandexGPT, alongside consumer products like ride hailing, music streaming, e-commerce and food delivery. Disruption was reported by users in dozens of Russian cities and also in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia. Yandex recommended that affected customers activate their alternative disaster recovery plans rather than wait for the Vladimir facility to come back online.

The lesson for every cloud customer

Whatever you think of the conflict behind these strikes, the technical takeaway is universal: when your provider loses a whole region at once, the assumptions behind multi-zone redundancy collapse. Zones protect against isolated hardware failures, not against events that take an entire site or the provider’s operating capacity offline. The Yandex customers who got through this week with minimal damage are the ones with backups and failover outside the affected platform, tested restoration procedures and contracts that reflect a realistic recovery timeline. European companies should ask themselves three questions today: where are our backups actually stored, could we rebuild from them, and how quickly. If any answer is unclear, the plan is not a plan.

If you want a sober review of your cloud architecture, backup strategy and disaster recovery readiness, contact Excello Digital at https://excello.digital/contact/. We help European businesses design infrastructure that survives bad days, not just average ones.