Ukraine just knocked out Russia's biggest tech company and its AI supercomputers

Ukraine just took out three of Russia's biggest data centres in four days.

And with them, the supercomputers that run Yandex's AI.

So who's Yandex? Russia's biggest tech company. Search engine, taxi app, maps, cloud computing, AI assistant. People call it Russia's Google.

Three sites got hit. Sasovo, four days ago. Kaluga, three days ago. Vladimir, one day ago.

Between them, those three sites held all three of Yandex's AI supercomputers.

Sasovo had two of them. Chervonenkis and Lyapunov.

Vladimir had the third. Galushkin. Reportedly the most powerful supercomputer in Russia.

Yandex hasn't said whether any of the three survived.

Now look at the numbers. NetBlocks tracks internet traffic, and it recorded Yandex Cloud's traffic falling to about 30 per cent of normal. Yandex LLC fell to about 63 per cent.

Cloudflare Radar recorded something even sharper. Bot traffic from Yandex's network dropped to around 0.4 per cent of its usual peak.

Yandex's own status page listed at least 84 services as offline.

And that's where ordinary people felt it.

Yandex Go is the taxi app millions of Russians use. It stopped working across Russian cities. Same failures showed up in Serbia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia.

Yandex Pro, the app drivers and couriers use for work, went down too. Reports say it started telling drivers to switch to Google Maps or Waze instead.

Yandex's share price fell about 4 per cent over the four days.

There was a human cost too.

Vladislav Shapsha, the governor of Kaluga region, said nine people were injured in the strike there.

In Vladimir, Yandex and the region's governor, Aleksandr Avdeyev, reported no injuries. But the strike knocked out two electrical substations serving about 5,000 people. Around 80 per cent of the power came back within an hour. Heating and water returned to normal.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's President, says the strikes are retaliation. Russia has been hitting Ukraine's own data centres and telecoms networks, and he says Ukraine responds in kind. That line is reported slightly differently across outlets, so it's treated here as his general position, not a confirmed word-for-word quote.