Russia's internet giant Yandex halts operations at major data center after drone attack

JUST IN: Russia's internet giant Yandex halts operations at a major data center after a drone strike sparked a fire at its facility in Ryazan, as Kyiv keeps striking Russian infrastructure.

A Ukrainian drone just took a Russian data center offline entirely.

Yandex, the company they call the Google of Russia, says a strike sparked a fire at its facility in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, and the whole center has stopped operating. Some services may be down for users across the country. The company says there are no casualties, and emergency crews are on site.

Kyiv hasn't claimed this one, but the pattern is loud. Ukraine has spent months hitting Russian infrastructure, oil refineries, the retailer Wildberries, and now the servers behind Russia's biggest search engine and its flagship AI model. President Zelenskyy said last week he'd double down on these strikes, calling refineries the money that finances the war.

So the war on infrastructure now runs both ways, and today it reached the machines that run Russia's internet.

This is Kateryna Kovalenko, reporting for HIT.