Two of Yandex's Five Data Centers Are Down After Ukrainian Drone Strikes
Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of the five data centers belonging to Yandex, and the damage has left the company — known as “Russia's Google” because it runs the country's most popular search engine — struggling to keep its AI chatbot and other online services running, Ars Technica reports. That is the shape of this story: not a model problem but a buildings problem. Whatever a chatbot can do when the servers are up, its availability depends on physical sites that can be struck.
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The strikes hit Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions on October 8 and 9, and Ars reports they came as a direct response to a Russian drone campaign against Ukraine's own data centers — one that has disrupted mobile phone and internet service for thousands of Ukrainians since late September.
Infrastructure behind ordinary connectivity is now an explicit target on both sides, and that is a shift worth naming: the exchange isn't a strike and a reprisal over military sites, it's data center against data center.
The detail that will outlast the news cycle is the mundane one — a leading search and AI company reduced to public statements about keeping its chatbot online, because the failure started at the site and the power supply, not the software.