# Drone Strikes Hit Three of Yandex’s Five Data Centers Inside Russia

*Sunday, October 11, 2026 at 6:10 AM UTC — Hamer Intelligence Services Desk*

**Published**: 2026-10-11T06:10:33.593Z (2h ago)
**Category**: cyber | **Region**: Eastern Europe
**Importance**: 8/10
**Sources**: OSINT
**Permalink**: https://hamerintel.com/data/articles/20234.md
**Source**: https://hamerintel.com/summaries

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**Deck**: Drones have struck Yandex data centers in Vladimir and Kaluga, so that three of the company’s five Russian facilities are now reported hit. The attacks sparked a major fire at a 40‑megawatt site, cut power to around 5,000 nearby residents, and forced evacuations, exposing how data hubs have become front-line targets.

A series of drone attacks against Yandex infrastructure has brought Russia’s digital backbone into the war, with three of the company’s five domestic data centers now reported damaged.

According to military and local reports, enemy drones struck a Yandex data center in Vladimir on October 11. A separate attack had already hit a Yandex facility in Kaluga on October 9. Taken together with an earlier strike on another site, this means three of Yandex’s five data centers in Russia have now come under attack.

One Ukrainian-linked channel described the Vladimir data center as a 40‑megawatt facility and said it was on fire after the strike. The same reporting said residents from nearby homes were being evacuated. Russian sources noted that around 5,000 people in the area lost electricity, highlighting how tightly these large server farms are tied into local power grids.

Yandex, a central player in Russia’s internet ecosystem, had not yet provided a detailed public breakdown of the damage in the material available here. Russian channels, however, acknowledged emergency responses and disruptions.

For users, data centers support search, email, maps, ride-hailing, food delivery, and cloud services. Hitting three out of five such facilities in a short span risks slowing or interrupting many everyday digital tools and some business operations, even if the company has redundancy in place to keep core services running.

Militarily, the strikes show that data centers are now considered legitimate wartime targets. Attacking them offers a way to disrupt communications, strain logistics that rely on routing software, and create economic costs well away from the front line. The ability of drones to reach cities like Vladimir and Kaluga also exposes gaps in Russian air defenses over key infrastructure.

For Russia’s authorities and technology firms, the concentration of critical computing power in a small number of large sites has become a visible weakness. Repeated hits in quick succession narrow the options for rerouting traffic and increase the pressure on backup systems.

The next meaningful indicators will be how quickly Yandex stabilizes its services, whether Russian officials announce new air-defense deployments over major data hubs, and whether further strikes against other technology or telecom facilities are reported. Any move to disperse computing capacity across more, smaller sites—or to harden existing mega-centers—would show how Moscow is adjusting to the risk that its digital infrastructure can be reached by drones.