Drones Hit Yandex's Sasovo Hub, Which Held Two of Its Three Supercomputers in 2021
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Drones Hit Yandex's Sasovo Hub, Which Held Two of Its Three Supercomputers in 2021
A second Yandex data centre, in Kaluga, was struck the next day. Yandex says consumer services are unaffected and has not said what happened to its A.I. training machines.
Drones hit Yandex's Sasovo data hub in Russia's Ryazan region on Thursday, Oct. 8, causing a fire and forcing the company to suspend operations at the site. Yandex said in 2021 that the hub hosted two of its three supercomputers, the Nvidia A100 machines used to train YandexGPT, and it has declined to say whether they were affected.
Reuters, in a report carried by The Star, describes Sasovo as one of Yandex's five large data centres, hosting "tens of thousands of servers". Al Jazeera reported that a second Yandex data centre, in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow, was struck on Friday, Oct. 9 and partly put out of action. Neither outlet gives a megawatt rating or a server count for either site.
What the outage looked like to customers
Yandex said its core consumer services were not affected and that it was restoring the affected ones. The Yandex Cloud website reported electricity supply problems in one data-centre zone and advised customers to use other zones. That is the design working as intended for a single-zone failure; a second strike in 24 hours tests it harder, because the other zones are the same company's other sites.
Detector404, an online monitoring service, recorded 58,268 user complaints over the past day, according to the Reuters report. Yandex shares on the Moscow Exchange fell 3%. In a company statement quoted by Al Jazeera, Yandex said: "Our teams are working day and night to keep services running and help those affected by the incident."
The compute at stake
The figure that matters most is two of three. Taking the 2021 statement at face value, Sasovo held two thirds of Yandex's supercomputing capacity for model training, and that count is five years old; Yandex has not said what its training fleet looks like now. Al Jazeera says Yandex's AI development is affected through the loss of two of the three supercomputers, but also notes that it does not quantify the effect, and the company has not confirmed the machines were damaged.
| Fact | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Large Yandex data centres | 5 | Reuters via The Star |
| Servers at Sasovo | "tens of thousands" | Reuters via The Star |
| Supercomputers at Sasovo (2021 statement) | 2 of 3 | Reuters via The Star |
| Support complaints in one day | 58,268 | Detector404, via Reuters |
| Share price move | -3% | Reuters via The Star |
Sberbank says Russian A.I. developers trail their US and Chinese counterparts by six to nine months, per the Reuters report. Replacing A100-class training capacity is a procurement problem as well as a repair problem, though neither report says what Yandex can buy or where.
Who says what, and what follows
Al Jazeera attributes the strikes to Ukraine. It quotes President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: "We always respond in mirror-like fashion". He said Russia has been hitting Ukrainian data centres and that Ukraine "can't share all the details". The same report says Russia has struck several Ukrainian data centres and telecom facilities over the past month, including in central Kyiv.
Russia's response is to move the risk, not remove it. Reuters says RBC reported that businesses were in talks with the government about building data centres in "friendly" countries, and that Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, gave the state power in August to take control of poorly protected critical infrastructure. Physical attacks on data infrastructure now sit alongside the cyberattack that forced French supermarkets to shut down refrigeration as a reminder that cloud capacity is a building, a power feed and a fleet of machines in a specific place. Spreading hardware wide is one answer, as in Anthropic's test of small models on 15 $55 Android TV boxes, though that was an inference demonstration, not a training cluster.
What to watch next
Three facts would settle the size of the loss. Yandex's confirmation of whether the Sasovo supercomputers are damaged, a restoration date for the Kaluga modules, and whether Yandex Cloud's status page reports the affected zone back in service. Yandex has said it is assessing the damage; until it publishes a date, the 2021 figure of two of three supercomputers is the only measure of the exposure.
Sources
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