Drone attack disrupts data centre in eastern Moscow, Russia says

Russia says a drone attack caused disruption at a data centre in eastern Moscow. That puts digital infrastructure in the Russian capital squarely in the line of fire.

What Russia is reporting

Russian authorities reported that a drone strike led to disruption at a facility in the eastern part of Moscow. The report described the effect as a disruption. It did not describe the site as destroyed.

The report also lands right after a run of attacks on Russian tech infrastructure. That context makes it hard to read as an isolated incident.

The Yandex strikes that came first

In early October 2026, Ukraine carried out drone strikes on two major data centres belonging to Yandex, one of Russia’s largest technology companies. Think of Yandex as Russia’s answer to a company that runs search, maps, cloud and AI all under one roof.

The first strike, on October 8, hit the Sasovo facility in the Ryazan region. It sparked a fire that brought operations to a complete halt. The site held tens of thousands of servers and two of Yandex’s three AI supercomputers.

Sasovo is not a new or minor asset. The hub opened in 2014, making it one of the longer-serving pieces of the company’s infrastructure.

A day later, on October 9, drones struck the larger Kaluga centre. That facility measures approximately 130,000 square metres and is counted among the largest data centres in Russia. It has been running since approximately 2023.

The Kaluga attack interfered with several operational modules tied to the company’s cloud services and AI work, including YandexGPT. That is the company’s large language model, its version of a ChatGPT-style assistant.

No Yandex employees were reported injured. The Kaluga governor did report nine injuries linked to other attacks across the region.

Investors noticed. Yandex shares fell between 3.75% and 4% on the Moscow Exchange after the attacks.

A tit-for-tat in the server room

The strikes on Russian data centres did not come out of nowhere. They followed Russian airstrikes on Ukrainian data centres in late September 2026.

What this means

The Sasovo case shows why concentration is a weakness. Two of Yandex’s three AI supercomputers sat at a single site. One fire was enough to take both offline.

For investors in Russian tech names, the Yandex share drop offers a preview. A move of between 3.75% and 4% still reflects a new category of risk being priced in: physical attacks on the infrastructure behind digital services.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.