Yandex ru-central1-b offline: Drone strike on Sasovo DC halts recovery, forcing backup activation

Yandex, a major Russian technology provider, confirmed that its cloud infrastructure in the ru-central1-b availability zone is currently offline. The outage stems from a fire at the company’s data center in Sasovo, located approximately 300 kilometers southeast of Moscow. According to Yandex, the fire resulted directly from a drone attack on the facility. Operations at the data center have been completely halted, leaving the specific cloud zone inaccessible to customers.

The risk

The incident highlights the vulnerability of physical cloud infrastructure to kinetic warfare. Yandex’s status page indicates that the ru-central1-b zone is down, and the company has not provided a timeline for restoration. In a statement, Yandex advised users that it will not be possible to restore service in the near future. The company recommended that customers employ alternative service restoration plans, including migrating workloads to its own bare metal servers where feasible.

Who is exposed

Users relying on Yandex Cloud’s ru-central1-b availability zone are directly affected by this outage. Yandex dominates the Russian market for search, email, and mapping services, and also operates a cloud computing service. The company has not specified which customers are impacted beyond the general availability zone designation. Ukrainian press reports suggest the attack may be retaliation for Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers, though Yandex has not commented on the source of the drone.

Cost and compliance

Reuters reports that Yandex remains uncertain if it is possible to restore operations at the Sasovo data center entirely. If the facility must be written off, it would follow a similar incident earlier this year involving Amazon Web Services. AWS decided its Bahrain facility could not be recovered after an Iranian drone attack. Industry executives have long warned that data centers are critical infrastructure and likely targets during conflict, either directly or through attacks on energy and communications grids.

What to watch

Managers should monitor Yandex’s official status page for updates on the ru-central1-b zone and any broader regional impacts. They should also review their current disaster recovery plans to ensure they include provisions for physical site destruction rather than just logical failures. Given Yandex’s advice, organizations should verify that their backup systems are active and capable of handling full workload migration if primary cloud services remain offline indefinitely.

What to do and how to stay safe: Yandex

• Verify that your organization has active backups stored in geographically distinct availability zones or with different cloud providers.
• Review your disaster recovery plan to ensure it accounts for physical destruction of data centers, not just software outages.
• Contact your cloud provider to understand their specific guidance on migrating workloads during prolonged physical site outages.
• Ensure your incident response team has clear communication channels for updating stakeholders when primary infrastructure is unavailable.

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General security guidance from the SecOps Signal newsroom. It is not confirmed advice from the organisations named in this story.

Frequently asked questions

Is Yandex Cloud still operating in other regions?

Yandex confirmed that the ru-central1-b availability zone is down, but did not specify the status of other zones in its statement.

Who conducted the drone attack on the Sasovo data center?

Yandex has not commented on the source of the attack, though Ukrainian press reports link it to retaliation for strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure.

Has Yandex confirmed if the data center can be repaired?

Yandex stated that restoring service in the near future is not possible, and Reuters reports uncertainty about long-term recovery.