Ukrainian drone attack takes out Russian datacenter

Russian web giant Yandex says one of its cloud availability zones is unavailable due to a drone attack.

Yandex is Russia’s rough equivalent of Google, and dominates the local market for search, email, and mapping services.

The company also operates a cloud computing service whose status page says its ru-central1-b availability zone is down.

“The incident was caused by a fire caused by a drone attack on Yandex's data center in Sasovo, which affected part of the Yandex Cloud infrastructure.

Data center operations have been completely halted.” Sasovo is a town around 300 kilometers southeast of Moscow.

Yandex later recommended users employ unspecified “alternative service restoration plans,” including its own bare metal servers, but advised users “it will not be possible to restore service in the near future.” The Russian company hasn’t commented on the source of the drone attack, but Ukrainian press report that President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Russia has attacked Ukrainian datacenters and that his government always responds in kind.

Reuters reports that Yandex is uncertain if it is possible to restore operations at the datacenter.

If Yandex must write off the datacenter, it will be the second cloud provider to lose facilities to drone attacks this year after AWS decided its Bahrain facility could not be recovered after an Iranian drone attack.

Iran hit AWS facilities because it believed the cloud giant hosts workloads for the US military and its suppliers, and that an attack could therefore disrupt hostilities.

For years, industry execs have told The Register that datacenters are critical infrastructure and will therefore likely become a target for kinetic attacks during conflict – either directly or by attacking their connections to energy grids and communications services.

Clouds and pundits alike advise using multiple geographically dispersed availability zones, and cloud suppliers, to improve resilience.

That advice is a little less potent in Russia, where sanctions mean local businesses aren’t welcome in clouds across the border.

Russia also has a smaller pool of cloud operators to choose from. ®