Ukraine knocks out two of Russia's Google's biggest data centres in back-to-back drone strikes

From the Newshound archive · first published 10 October 2026.

Yandex, which runs Russia's dominant search engine, taxi, food-delivery and AI services, warned it was "very difficult to predict" when operations would return to normal. President Zelensky confirmed the strikes were retaliation for weeks of Russian attacks on Ukrainian data infrastructure. Yandex shares fell more than four per cent on the Moscow exchange.

Ukrainian arms maker Firepoint said its FP-1 attack drones were used in the Kaluga strike, targeting what it called Yandex's biggest data centre.

The Sasovo hub houses two of the three supercomputers powering Yandex's AI model, and its operations were "completely suspended" after Thursday's strike.

Start-up founder Alexander Savitsky said his dating app's 8,000 users have been locked out since Thursday, with three years of work at risk.