In October 2026, Russia's digital infrastructure faced a large-scale incident: a powerful fire broke out at a critical digital infrastructure facility in the Ryazan region following a drone attack. Yandex's largest data center, located in the town of Sasovo, came under direct fire.

Scale of Destruction and Impact on Services

As seen in video footage released by eyewitnesses, a severe fire erupted inside the data center facility, with thick black smoke rising several kilometers into the sky. Almost immediately after the first reports of the emergency, users across Russia began massively complaining about a global outage affecting key Yandex services and the Yandex Cloud platform, which is supported by independent monitoring service Downdetector data.

Significance of the Facility for Russia's Digital Ecosystem

The Sasovo data center is a strategic data processing and storage hub launched in 2014. The facility features an autonomous energy infrastructure with a maximum declared power supply capacity of up to 53 MW, its own 110 kV substation, uninterrupted power supply systems, and diesel generators. The complex ensures the stability of search engines, email, navigation services, and corporate cloud solutions.

Contradictory Data

While specialized Ukrainian and independent Russian Telegram channels, as well as the ASTRA resource, report a direct hit on the Yandex data center on the territory of the Sasta plant, official Russian agencies and company structures traditionally offer restrained comments or attempt to minimize the scale of damage, claiming fires were localized at adjacent industrial sites without detailing the technical condition of the server equipment.

Context and Retaliatory Strikes on IT Infrastructure

This incident occurs against the backdrop of an ongoing escalation of strikes on critical infrastructure objects. Previously, Ukrainian data centers faced similar attacks, including facilities belonging to Omega Telecom and dline.ua companies, leading to severe disruptions in communications and digital services in Ukraine. Experts note that physical and cyber warfare against data centers is becoming a new priority in the technological confrontation.