Five out of eight premises of Yandex data center in Vladimir damaged after AFU strike

The data processing center houses Yandex's second most powerful supercomputer – "Galushkin". It has 136 computing nodes and 1088 NVIDIA A100 accelerators. In the last available version of the global TOP500 ranking for June, it ranked 134th.

"Galushkin" was created in 2021. Along with the company's two other supercomputers – "Chervonenkis" and "Lyapunov" – it was used to train YaLM family language models, on the basis of which YandexGPT and the voice assistant "Alice" were developed.

Yandex confirmed that drones damaged the infrastructure of the data processing center in Vladimir, as a result of which its operation was completely halted.

Earlier, the AFU attacked two more of the company's data processing centers: in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, where the supercomputers "Chervonenkis" and "Lyapunov" were located, and also in Kaluga. Fires occurred at these facilities.

According to T-Invariant, as a result of the attacks, all three Yandex supercomputers could have been at risk of failure. Users in Russia and neighboring countries faced disruptions in the operation of taxi services, banking applications, "Alice" smart speakers, and cloud infrastructure.

After the fire in Sasovo, the ru-central1-b availability zone was disconnected, and after the damage in Vladimir, ru-central1-a was affected. The Yandex Cloud platform was switched to emergency mode, and the rest of the IT infrastructure was deemed unstable. The problems also affected the systems of the Federal Tax Service of Russia, arbitration courts, and other companies, including Dodo Pizza, M.Video, Lenta, and Magnit.

On October 12, the head of Russia's Ministry of Digital Development, Maksut Shadayev, stated that Yandex faced an unprecedented attack. According to him, the ministry, together with the Ministry of Defense, is discussing how to protect data processing centers in Russia.

Valery Ermakov, Deputy Chairman of Rostelecom, in turn, proposed creating a so-called "Doomsday" data processing center – a backup site that would allow the restoration of damaged services.

In addition to the three affected facilities, Yandex has two more large data processing centers in the Moscow Oblast – in Mytishchi and Ivanteyevka.

According to market sources of Kommersant, replacing the damaged equipment could take about six months.

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