Drone strikes on Yandex data centers disrupted services across Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Serbia. Serbia hosts Yandex’s largest international office and engineering hub outside of Russia, with over 1000 employees, and aims to expand the number to 2000. It has been operating in Serbia since 2018.
Yandex subsidiary, Yango Group, headquartered in Dubai, entered into a memorandum of understanding to host infrastructure at the State Data Centre in Kragujevac, Serbia. Under a colocation model, the company will deploy its servers in the facility, which is scheduled to go online in 2025. It was to become the company’s primary infrastructure site, supporting services across global markets.
According to the Russian media, all three Yandex supercomputers may have been disabled. The last of these facilities was attacked on the night of October 11, the Vladimir data center was damaged, forcing the company to completely shut down its operations. Yandex’s supercomputer, Galushkin, is located there.
Moscow Times writes that the company’s first two data centers and two supercomputers were damaged in air raids on the nights of October 8 and 9. The data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, housed Chervonenkis, Yandex’s most powerful supercomputer, and Lyapunov. Following its launch in 2021, Chervonenkis ranked 19th in the global TOP500 ranking, but subsequently dropped to the top 200. Sanctions are preventing the company from upgrading its infrastructure.
The second attacked facility is located in Kaluga. This is Yandex’s largest data center and one of the largest in Russia. All three of the company’s supercomputers are primarily designed for training neural networks.
Yandex Taxi, branded as Yandex Go, another subsidiary, holds a near-monopoly on cab rides in Belgrade and is also available in Pančevo, Novi Sad, and Kragujevac.
If you visit places like Serbia, do not get into small talk with cab drivers, in which you would divulge your personal information – occupation, contacts, family details, financial situation, anything sensitive. Taxi drivers are a premier HUMINT source.
In authoritarian countries, most of them are (secret) police informants, and when a company is owned by a company located in a totalitarian state like Russia, you might wanna keep your mouth shut when interacting with their employees – Yandex and other Russian taxi companies, including those operating abroad, are required by Russian law to transfer all of the information about their customers to the FSB.
