Ukrainian drones attacked the town of Sasovo in Russia’s Ryazan Region overnight into Oct. 8, striking the Sasta machine-tool plant. The facility houses a data center run by tech giant Yandex, often dubbed “Russia’s Google.” The company confirmed that a fire had broken out at the site after the attack.
Ukrainian monitoring channels were among the first to report the drone attack and its aftermath, while authorities have not yet commented on the incident. A Russian Defense Ministry summary listed attacks on the Ryazan Region, along with strikes in the Moscow, Tambov, Tula, and Oryol regions, but gave no details about damage.
NASA FIRMS fire-monitoring maps showed a blaze at the same location as the Sasta plant and Yandex data center. The fire appeared on maps shortly after 2 a.m.
Yandex itself confirmed that the facility had been hit by drones.
“A fire broke out at the Yandex data center in Sasovo as a result of a drone attack, affecting part of the infrastructure. There were no injuries, and emergency services are working at the site to deal with the aftermath,” Kremlin-aligned outlet RBC quoted the company as saying.
The center’s operations are currently suspended, rendering some services unavailable to users. For example, the social media autoposting service Postmypost experienced temporary disruptions before later returning online.
Downdetector also recorded complaints about Yandex Search, Yandex Disk, and other services.
Notably, Russian news agency Interfax quoted the same company statement almost word for word — but with one exception. The phrase “a fire broke out as a result of a drone attack” was replaced with simply “an incident occurred.” The agency did not specify what kind of incident. State-run RIA Novosti also omitted any mention of a drone attack, describing what happened as a fire.
Yandex said in 2021 that its Sasovo data center housed two of the company’s three supercomputers that were built with Nvidia A100 chips and used to train its YandexGPT large language model. The company declined to say whether the systems were damaged in the attack, according to Reuters.
The Yandex data center in Sasovo opened in 2014. Local authorities had previously described it as a “highly promising high-tech enterprise.”
