A Ukrainian drone strike has knocked out multiple modules at Yandex's largest data center, the second such attack on the Russian tech giant's infrastructure in two days.
The facility sits in the Grabtsevo industrial park near Kaluga, Russia, and only opened in late 2023. At 1.4 million square feet with 63 megawatts of power capacity and more than 3,800 server racks, it was built as Yandex's biggest data center and a hub for expanding its cloud business. Russian state media outlet TASS confirmed that several modules were "completely taken out of operation" after the strike. The attack follows a similar drone strike two days earlier on a Yandex facility in Sasovo, which disrupted Yandex Mail, Disk, Documents, Pay, and Market even as the company insisted core services stayed online.
Two hits on Yandex's cloud infrastructure within 48 hours suggest Ukraine's drone operators are treating Russian data centers as legitimate targets, not just military or energy sites. That shift matters because cloud outages ripple into everyday services Russians rely on, from email to payments, in ways that are harder to wave off as collateral damage.
Whether Kaluga was the intended target or just Sasovo's follow-up act, the pattern is hard to miss: Russia's digital backbone is now taking hits about as often as its power grid.