A drone attack set fire to and knocked out the data center of Sasovoin the Ryazan region, on the night ofOctober 8. Yandex confirmed the complete shutdown of the plant and spoke of an accident that affected part of the infrastructure, with no injuries. It is the first major blow to a Russian computing center since Moscow launched the war against Ukraine.
Inside that building there are tens of thousands of servers and, above all, two of the company’s three supercomputers: Chervonenkis And Lyapunovboth built on accelerators Nvidia A100. The first is the most powerful system in the hands of Yandex and in 2021 it occupied the 19th position of the Top 500; your 21.53 PFLOPS in FP64 today they are barely worth the 101st place. He was trained on those machines YandexGPTthe reference linguistic model in Russia. The third supercomputer, Galushkin, is located in Vladimir.
The company has not yet clarified whether the hardware is recoverable, and here lies the technical issue. Western sanctions have long prevented any upgrade of those clusters: burnt components mean unavailable components. If Chervonenkis and Lyapunov are gone, the next round of training will have to rely on Chinese infrastructure.
The account of the inefficiencies for Russia
Power issues in the Availability Zone ru-central1-b of Yandex Cloud started at1:31 Moscow time, with an invitation to customers to move traffic to the other areas, which remained operational. At 8.26am the area was still inaccessible. Yandex declared its main consumer services operational, but users reported malfunctions in Mail, Disk, Documents, Pay and Market.
The wave spread far beyond the company perimeter, as reconstructed by the specialized press: Cian, Litmarket, Russian Railways, Spartak Moscow, the Rapira cryptocurrency exchange, Astral and management solutions were out of action 1C. Disruptions also occurred on the corporate systems of T-Bank, Ozon and Wildberries, while a bus operator in the Moscow region suspended online ticket sales. Detector404 counted 58,268 reports in 24 hours and several Russian newspapers remained unreachable, including RIA Novosti, Vesti and Interfax. Yandex stock closed down by 2.45%.
The target remains ambiguous. The data center occupies from 2014 the sheds of the former machine tool factory Sastaa company under Western sanctions because it also supplies industrial plants to companies in the defense sector. Regional authorities reported a fire at an industrial site, without specifying which of the two locations was the target.
From the September 23 Russian raids damaged or destroyed the data centers of at least eight Ukrainian operators, including Virtual Systems, MiroHost, CosmoNova, DataGroup and CityHost, also knocking torrent trackers 1337x and NordicQuality offline. Kiev is moving some of its digital infrastructure underground; Russian companies, for their part, are considering relying on countries considered friends by Moscow. A rather narrow range of options, which in practice boils down to China.
