Just before midnight on October 7, a drone strike set fire to a Yandex data center in Sasovo, a town in Russia’s Ryazan region about 300 km from Moscow. The fire stopped all work in the building. Computing reports that one of Yandex Cloud’s availability zones, known as ru-central1-b, went offline, and that Yandex told customers the zone is unlikely to come back soon and that they should make other plans.
Yandex did not say who was behind the attack. Ukrainian media credited Ukraine, and President Zelensky said Ukraine responds in kind when Russia strikes Ukrainian data centers. This post is not about the war. It is about what the incident shows anyone who keeps their data, their business or their website “in the cloud.”
No malware, no hacker
Most of what we write about here is digital: stolen passwords, unpatched servers, ransomware. This outage had none of that. Yandex’s status page first called it a power failure. A later update said a fire caused by a drone had shut the site down.
Users reported problems at banking services, Russian Railways, the video site RuTube and the property site Cian. On the afternoon of October 8, the websites of several major Russian news outlets stopped loading for a time. Meduza noted the timing but did not confirm the strike caused it, and those sites were back up the same day.
It is easy to forget that “the cloud” is a marketing word. Every file you store there sits on a disk in a real building, with real power lines, cooling and a roof that can catch fire.
The name itself is part of the reason we forget. For decades, engineers drew the telephone network, and later the internet, as a cloud on their diagrams. The symbol meant the part you did not manage and did not need to see. When companies began renting out servers and storage in the mid-2000s, they borrowed the same picture, and its meaning came along with it: don’t worry about what’s inside. The buildings were there all along. The word was simply chosen to hide them.
What an availability zone is supposed to do
Large cloud providers divide each region into availability zones. Each zone is a separate data center, or group of them, with its own power and network. The idea is that if one zone fails, a service spread across two or three zones keeps running in the zones that are still up.
That design works only for customers who use it. A company that put everything in one zone because it was cheaper or simpler has nowhere to fail over to when that zone disappears. From the outside, we cannot tell which of the affected services had made that choice. But the spread of the outages suggests that more than a few had.
Not the first time this year
Computing points out that if the Sasovo zone is not restored, it will be the second data center lost to a military strike this year. The first was an AWS facility in Bahrain, which Iran struck in March.
Data centers have always faced fires, floods and power cuts. What is new is that they are now plainly treated as targets. Any plan for keeping a service running has to account for a building simply being gone.
What we do not know
Yandex has not said how much customer data, if any, was lost, or whether it was copied to other zones beforehand. Two of the company’s three supercomputers, which it uses to build its AI model, are in the same building, and Yandex has not said whether they still work. There is also no public timeline for rebuilding.
What you can do about it
Most readers do not run a cloud platform, but many of us run a website, a small business or a family photo archive that depends on one. The lessons scale down well:
- Keep a backup somewhere else. A backup stored in the same data center as the original will burn with it. Use a different provider, or at least a different region. On my own servers, backups go to a separate company entirely.
- Test a restore. A backup you have never restored from is a hope, not a plan. Try bringing one back at least once.
- Ask your host where your site lives. Find out which data center or region holds your site, and whether your plan copies anything to a second location.
- Keep the files you cannot replace in two places you control. For personal photos and documents, that can be as simple as an external drive at home plus one cloud service.
Security usually means keeping the wrong people out. Sometimes it means surviving when the building itself is gone. The cloud makes that easier than it used to be, but only for those who plan for it.
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