On the night of October 8, 2026, a large data center belonging to Russian tech behemoth Yandex, located in the town of Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, came under attack from Ukrainian drones. The assault ignited a fire and inflicted damage on a portion of the infrastructure, ultimately leading to the complete shutdown of the data center. This particular facility stands as one of Yandex's five principal data centers, housing tens of thousands of servers and two supercomputers dedicated to training AI models. In the wee hours of the following day, Yandex's data center in Kaluga Oblast also found itself under drone attack, resulting in the complete paralysis of multiple modules. Fortunately, these incidents spared any casualties, but they did wreak havoc on some of Yandex's services, including cloud services, online storage, and email. This disruption cascaded to affect dozens of mainstream platforms across Russia, spanning railways, banks, and telecom operators. Following the attacks, Yandex's stock price took a nosedive, plummeting more than 3%. The company issued a warning, cautioning that some services might experience temporary unavailability and advising customers to transfer their business workloads to other operational zones. These attacks are widely perceived as Ukraine's retaliatory move in response to prior Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers, signaling the formal escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict into the digital and cyber realms.