After an overnight drone attack on a Yandex data center in Ryazan Oblast, banking services and hundreds of sites went down across russia. Zelensky: "We always respond in kind."
Overnight into 8 October, drones reportedly struck a Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, and by late afternoon a large-scale internet outage had hit russia. Kyiv Independent and Ukrinform reported this, citing The Moscow Times and monitoring channels. Ukraine's military had not officially confirmed the strike at the time of publication.
According to the monitoring channels Exilenova+ and ASTRA, the facility sits on the grounds of the Sasta plant, which makes machine tools and supplies russia's defense industry. Eyewitnesses filmed a large fire. Yandex acknowledged an "incident" and reported power problems in one availability zone of Yandex Cloud, warning that the outage could affect other parts of its cloud network. The company did not name a cause. Volunteers Support Ukraine stresses that details of the strike are still being clarified, so we rely only on what several sources have confirmed.
Around 16:00 local time, disruptions began in many parts of the russian internet, most severely in Moscow and St. Petersburg. A number of banking services, Google, RuTube, the russian railways website and many retail sites were unreachable. The carrier Mostransavto blamed its ticketing failures on the data center shutdown and warned that restoration could take up to 24 hours.
On 8 October the president told reporters: "We always respond in kind. You all know they have been striking our data centers, and still are, so we responded to them." He did not disclose all details of the operation. The same day, Ukraine's General Staff also confirmed a hit on the Salavat oil refinery in Bashkortostan.
Volunteers Support Ukraine continues to help people affected by the war in whatever way the available resources allow.
