{"slug": "ukraine-has-dealt-a-big-blow-to-russias-ai-and-cloud-infrastructure", "title": "Ukraine Has Dealt a Big Blow to Russia’s AI and Cloud Infrastructure", "summary": "Ukrainian drone strikes shut down Yandex's data centre in the Vladimir region and damaged facilities in Kaluga and Sasovo near Moscow, where two of the three supercomputers used to develop Yandex's AI model are housed, according to Reuters. The Kyiv Post reported that the Alice voice assistant, Yandex Music, Telemost and Yandex Compute Cloud suffered outages, with users also reporting banking and rideshare app failures and disruptions to retail apps including Magnit and Fix Price. The attacks mark an expansion of Ukraine's long-range drone campaign from oil refineries to Russia's cloud and AI infrastructure.", "body_md": "The big story out of the Ukraine War for 2026 has been Ukraine’s ability to [strike oil infrastructure](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2026/10/11/how-ukraine-uses-precision-drone-strikes-hobble-russian-oil-refineries/) deep inside Russia. These are new capabilities that stem from the maturing of specialist divisions in the Ukrainian military like its [1st Separate Center of Unmanned Systems](https://usforces.army/en/units/1-center). With purpose-built fixed-wing drones like the [AN-196 RS and FP-6](https://militarnyi.com/en/news/ukraine-an-196-rs-fp-6-long-range-drones/)—basically just exploding airplanes—Ukraine has spent this year turning up the volume on this war for Russia and the wider world through the power of blowing important things up.\n\nBut it’s not just oil. Today, a big chunk of Russia’s cloud and AI infrastructure has been blown up. Services are disrupted, or completely shut down.\n\nOver the past few days, one of the focal points for Ukraine’s onslaught has been Yandex, a company the New York Times [once called](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/world/europe/michael-calvey-russia-jailed.html), “a version of Google, Amazon and Uber rolled into one.” As [explained by Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-data-centre-vladimir-area-shut-down-after-drone-attack-2026-10-11/), the third attack on Yandex, which occurred Sunday morning, was pretty devastating, “resulting in the complete shutdown of its data centre in the Vladimir region.”\n\nPer Reuters, this comes within days of attacks on another data center facility in Kalugg, and one in Sasovo near Moscow, where it sounds like Yandex performs most of its training runs. (Reuters describes it as “where two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company’s AI model are housed.”)\n\nIf you take [the Kyiv Post](https://www.kyivpost.com/post/86708) at its word, it sounds almost like a switch has been flipped, and a ton of important services are just off in much of Russia, along with Russian services across the wider world. Perhaps most notably, the Alice voice assistant—Yandex’s answer to Siri or Alexa—is reportedly down. That would mean users with Yandex’s Station line of smart speaker devices can’t interact with them properly.\n\nThe Kyiv Post says Yandex Music, and Telemost, its version of Google Meet, were also disabled at the time it was writing on Sunday.\n\nAnd since Yandex’s data centers are also critical cloud infrastructure for other services, the tendrils of the outage are widely dispersed—again, according to the Kyiv Post. Yandex Compute Cloud, a provider of virtual machines, is one of the services experiencing what the Kyiv Post calls “extensive outages.”\n\nThings get a bit darker if you dig into just how important Yandex Cloud is across Russia. Yandex offers, for instance, [specialized cloud solutions for healthcare](https://yandex.cloud/en/solutions/healthcare?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F). It also provides at least some of the cloud storage used, in theory, to safeguard Russian citizen’s [private data for government use](https://yandex.cloud/en/solutions/152-fz).\n\nAnd, much like the attacks you may remember from earlier this year, in which it struck [distribution centers belonging to Wildberries](https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-wildberries-oil-refinery-2a90ab9665931b35ddd191a2beaa9165), Russia’s answer to Amazon, these attacks are creating chaos for consumers. The Kyiv Post writes that users have complained on Sunday about banking and rideshare app failures. Apps for major retail companies like the food sales colossus Magnit, and Fix Price, which is a little like Dollar General, are also apparently being interrupted.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ukraine-has-dealt-a-big-blow-to-russias-ai-and-cloud-infrastructure", "canonical_source": "https://gizmodo.com/ukraine-has-dealt-a-big-blow-to-russias-ai-and-cloud-infrastructure-2000824731", "published_at": "2026-10-11 17:55:07+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-11 17:59:42.749343+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "artificial-intelligence", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Yandex", "Ukraine", "Russia", "Reuters", "Kyiv Post", "Alice", "Yandex Compute Cloud", "Magnit"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ukraine-has-dealt-a-big-blow-to-russias-ai-and-cloud-infrastructure", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ukraine-has-dealt-a-big-blow-to-russias-ai-and-cloud-infrastructure.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ukraine-has-dealt-a-big-blow-to-russias-ai-and-cloud-infrastructure.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ukraine-has-dealt-a-big-blow-to-russias-ai-and-cloud-infrastructure.jsonld"}}