In Sasovo, Russia, "Sasta" plant, which houses "Yandex" data centre, is on fire. VIDEO
In the town of Sasovo in the Ryazan Region of Russia, a major fire broke out on the premises of the ‘Sasta’ machine-tool plant during the night of 8 October. The ‘Yandex DC Sasovo’ data centre is also located on this industrial site.
This was reported by Censor.NET, citing Russian and Ukrainian OSINT sources.
According to OSINT analysts at ASTRA, the fire broke out specifically on the premises of the "Sasta" plant. The location of the "Yandex DC" data centre on the plant premises is also confirmed by open-source mapping data and materials previously published by data centre staff.
The plant manufactures equipment for industry and the Russian defence industry
"Sasta" specialises in the production of numerically controlled metal-cutting machine tools, in particular high-precision machining centres. Such equipment is used in Russia’s defence, aerospace, transport and heavy industries.
The company forms part of the manufacturing infrastructure of the Russian military-industrial complex: its equipment is essential for the production of high-precision metal parts and assemblies. Previously, "Sasta" supplied specialised machine tools to Roscosmos enterprises.
The fire caused disruptions to Yandex Cloud’s operations
The site also houses the large ‘Yandex DC Sasovo’ data centre. Following reports of the fire, power supply disruptions were recorded in the operation of the Yandex Cloud platform.
In particular, problems arose in the ru-central1-b availability zone. As a result of the incident, some users experienced unavailability or disruptions to computing resources, networks, data storage, databases, Kubernetes and other cloud services.
Yandex Cloud recommended shifting workloads to other availability zones where possible and reported that work was underway to restore services.
The cause of the fire has not been officially established
Russian and Ukrainian monitoring sources have linked the fire to a possible attack. However, at the time of publication, there has been no official confirmation that a plant or data centre was hit, nor are there any precise details regarding the nature of the damage.
Pavel Malkov, Governor of the Ryazan Region, has reportedly not commented on the attack at this stage.
