Drone Strike Knocks Out Yandex's Largest Russian Data Center
Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours
A drone attack on October 9 struck Yandex's Kaluga data center, completely disabling several modules, according to Russian state media TASS. The facility, opened in 2023, was designed as Yandex's largest in Russia, with 130,000 square meters and 63 megawatts of power capacity. It supports internal services and Yandex Cloud. The strike follows a Ukrainian drone hit on Yandex's Sasovo data center in the Ryazan region.
Several modules of the Yandex data center in Kaluga have been completely taken out of operation as a result of a UAV attack, the company reports.
- RomanPushkin
Should we call it "Yandex experiment" from now on? Because it seems like the experiment didn't go well:
April 27, 2020:
"Yandex highlighted negative articles about Navalny in its search results; the company called it an "experiment."
https://zona-media.translate.goog/news/2020/04/27/navyandex?...
- PeterCorless
American and European data center providers should start thinking about design for resiliency versus drone and missile strikes.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/drone-and-data-ce...
- renyicircle
Damn, this would have been a good argument for the US to fund Ukrainian long-distance operations, had Russia not been so far behind in the AI race already.
- ortusdux
From reddit - "Right now, Yandex's biggest services are down: taxis, delivery, and Alisa. Moscow is paralyzed; it's impossible to order a taxi. Orders aren't going through."
https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1x1q...
- gumby
The Internet is almost 100% packet switching, a technique that someone brilliant in ARPA came up with the idea of claiming it was intended for nuclear warfare survival, in order to ensure funding.
“Data centers” need not be hyper-centralized. There’s an economy of scale of course, both in the building itself and in very local transmission. But all scale curves have knees, and one is survivability.
It’s possible a bunch of smaller 10 MW DCs might be faster to build, more survivable, and easier to get approved while being perfectly acceptable for most workloads.
- lapkaaaa
New Startup idea - private anti-air batteries for data centers
- arpinum
Seems like a mistake to stagger these hits, doing both in the same hour could have taken out backups before they had a chance to replicate elsewhere.
- thinkcontext
Interesting to see this and the targeting of data centers in the Middle East. Its critical infrastructure and a hit gets the attacker a lot of bang for the buck in terms of economic damage.