Susanna Riva This month, Russian technology company Yandex faced a series of airstrikes by Ukrainian drones targeting its data centers. Despite the vibrations caused by the attacks, the company announced that its three supercomputers —identified as Chervonenkis, Galushkin, and Lyapunov—remained intact.
The damaged facilities, located in Sasovo (Ryazan region), Kaluga and Vladimir, suffered temporary disruptions in transport services, food delivery and banking operations.
To ensure continuity, Yandex has moved the powerful machines to new, more secure sites that are less vulnerable to further drone attacks.
Supercomputers Relocated: Where and Why
The three units, introduced between 2020 and 2021, were among the 500 most powerful in the world, with Chervonenkis ranked 19th in 2021.
Because each supercomputer operates as an independent node, Yandex was able to relocate them separately, avoiding dependence on a single cluster. The new machines were chosen for their ability to withstand shock waves and integrate with existing electronic warfare systems.
Defense measures implemented
The Ministry of Digital Development has provided guidelines for protecting data centers: construction of underground facilities for the most critical components, blast shielding, counter-drone systems , and data backup to external servers.
Collaboration with the Armed Forces and the National Guard has been strengthened to ensure constant monitoring of air threats.
Repercussions on services and institutional reactions
The outages temporarily affected users of Yandex Taxi, Yandex.Eda, and Yandex.Bank, as well as businesses using the Yandex Cloud platform. The Kremlin stated that, while it is premature to quantify the economic losses, the company is implementing all necessary procedures to restore operations. President Vladimir Putin promised a decisive response, calling on the government to strengthen the defense of the country's digital infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Yandex has reassured customers: once reactivated, the supercomputers will return to being part of the service infrastructure and will continue to support the training of core language models , a key element of the company's future AI capabilities.