Drone Strike Knocks Out Yandex Datacenter. Industry Told You So.

A drone strike has taken out one of Yandex's datacenters in Sasovo, a town roughly 300 kilometres southeast of Moscow, causing a fire that has completely halted operations at the facility. The company's cloud status page confirmed its ru-central1-b availability zone is down and, in a fairly bleak update, Yandex told customers not to expect recovery anytime soon.

Yandex is Russia's answer to Google. Search, maps, email, cloud computing. The works. So when one of its availability zones goes dark, it is not a minor inconvenience.

The company has advised affected customers to dust off their "alternative service restoration plans" and consider switching to bare metal servers in the meantime. Vague advice, but there probably is not much else to say when your datacenter has burned down.

Yandex has stayed quiet on who launched the drones. It did not need to say much. Ukrainian media reports that President Zelensky confirmed his government responds in kind when Russia targets Ukrainian infrastructure, which has been a recurring feature of the war. Draw your own conclusions.

If Yandex ends up writing the facility off entirely, it joins a short but growing list. Earlier this year, AWS concluded its Bahrain datacenter could not be recovered after an Iranian drone strike. Iran targeted it on the basis that AWS hosts workloads for the US military, making it a legitimate target in their calculation.

None of this is surprising to anyone who has paid attention. Datacenter executives have been warning for years that physical infrastructure is a soft target during active conflict, whether hit directly or taken offline by attacks on power grids and fibre connections. The standard advice has always been the same: spread your workloads across multiple availability zones in different geographic regions, and ideally across more than one cloud provider.

Turns out that advice was not just theoretical. Redundancy is not a luxury feature. It is the whole point.