Ukrainian drones strike largest data center in Russia, multiple parts of 1.4 million square foot campus knocked offline

Hot on the heels of a Ukrainian drone strike on a Russian Yandex data center in Sasovo that caused a major outage, a Yandex facility in Kaluga has been struck in a similar fashion. The huge data center was so badly damaged that Russian state media admitted that multiple modules had been removed from service completely.

United24 Media reports that the facility is located in Grabtsevo industrial park and was designed to be the largest Yandex data center in all of Russia. It only entered service in the second half of 2023, lasting three years before this incident.

The Kaluga data center is a sprawling complex that covers around 1.4 million square feet (130,000 square meters). It's so vast that its 63-megawatt power capacity is around 50% higher than some other data centers owned by Yandex. With more than 3,800 server racks, it's perhaps easy to see why it became a target for Ukraine's drone operators. If, of course, the facility was the intended target for the attack — something yet to be confirmed.

As for what all those server racks actually do, it's reported that Yandex's internal services are housed at the facility. It was ultimately built to allow Yandex to expand its cloud offering.

It's as yet unclear how this drone strike is affecting everyday Russians, but the previous Sasovo strike also impacted Yandex Cloud. At the time, users reported problems with Yandex Mail, Disk, Documents, Pay, and Market despite Yandex claiming that key services remained up and running.

Russian state media TASS confirmed the severity of the attack, saying that “Several modules of the Yandex data center in Kaluga have been completely taken out of operation as a result of a UAV attack, [Yandex] reports.”

This incident is just the latest in a run of attacks on digital infrastructure both in Russia and Ukraine. Russian missiles struck a Ukrainian facility earlier this month, taking the world's second-largest torrent tracker offline in the process.

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