[Yandex Cloud Availability Zone Halted After Ukrainian Drone Strike]
Putin this cloud region back into operation might not be possible, says Yandex
Russian web giant Yandex says one of its cloud availability zones is unavailable due to a drone attack.
Yandex is Russia’s rough equivalent of Google, and dominates the local market for search, email, and mapping services. The company also operates a cloud computing service whose status page says its ru-central1-b availability zone is down.
“The incident was caused by a fire caused by a drone attack on Yandex’s data center in Sasovo, which affected part of the Yandex Cloud infrastructure. Data center operations have been completely halted.” Sasovo is a town around 300 kilometers southeast of Moscow.
Yandex later recommended users employ unspecified “alternative service restoration plans,” including its own bare metal servers, but advised users “it will not be possible to restore service in the near future.”
The Russian company hasn’t commented on the source of the drone attack, but Ukrainian press report that President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Russia has attacked Ukrainian datacenters and that his government always responds in kind.
Reuters reports that Yandex is uncertain if it is possible to restore operations at the datacenter.
The Russian company hasn’t commented on the source of the drone attack, but Ukrainian press report that President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Russia has attacked Ukrainian datacenters and that his government always responds in kind.
Reuters reports that Yandex is uncertain if it is possible to restore operations at the datacenter.
If Yandex must write off the datacenter, it will be the second cloud provider to lose facilities to drone attacks this year after AWS decided its Bahrain facility could not be recovered after an Iranian drone attack.
Iran hit AWS facilities because it believed the cloud giant hosts workloads for the US military and its providers, and that an attack could therefore disrupt hostilities.
For years, industry executives have told The Register that data centers are critical infrastructure and will therefore likely become a target for kinetic attacks during conflict—either directly or by striking their grid and communication links. Cloud providers generally advise distributing services across multiple geographically separated locations to enhance resilience.
That advice is somewhat less feasible in Russia, where sanctions limit international cloud options and the domestic operator base is narrow.
