Ukrainian drones attacked Sberbank's large data center in Saratov Oblast

Saratov Oblast Governor Roman Busargin reported the drone attack on the region on the morning of October 14. According to him, several residential buildings were damaged in Balakovo, and one person died. Local residents reported dozens of explosions.

Ukrainian arms manufacturer Fire Point first stated that this strike targeted a Sberbank data center. The Russian publication "Agentstvo", after analyzing the geolocation of the published photos, also concluded that they showed a damaged data center, and soon the bank itself acknowledged the attack.

Sberbank, however, stated that its systems and services were allegedly operating normally. They claimed there were no problems with banking operations. However, according to DownDetector data, this did not entirely correspond to reality.

Russian users began massively complaining about problems with websites and services. Among them were Mail.ru, "Tochka Bank", Yandex services, "Kontur" program, and Ozon marketplace. People could not load pages, log into personal accounts, send emails, or make payments. Official reasons for the outage were not reported.

The data center in Balakovo is still under construction, but according to monitoring channels, some of its parts might already have been operational. The project cost exceeds one billion dollars. The center is designed for almost three thousand server racks, up to 120 thousand servers, and an electrical capacity of up to 82 MW.

It is known that Sberbank's data center in Balakovo began urgently purchasing air defense systems shortly before the attack, writes the publication "Vazhnye Istorii". The company "InfoTech Balakovo", which is responsible for its construction and operation, has placed orders since August for electronic warfare systems, personal protective equipment, firefighting equipment, and anti-aircraft weapons.

The most significant orders were placed urgently on October 5 — two days before the Ukrainian Armed Forces' strikes on Yandex data centers and nine days before the attack on Sberbank's data center in Balakovo itself.

From October 8 to 11, drones damaged three of Yandex's five data centers — in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast; Kaluga; and Vladimir Oblast. After this, users reported problems with "Yandex Pay," "Yandex Go," maps, search, voice assistant "Alice," and the Yandex Cloud platform, which is used by other organizations.

Outages were also felt in Belarus. In particular, there were problems with "Yandex Taxi," and some users could not access files on "Yandex Disk."

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