The strike on Balakovo

Ukrainian drones hit a Sberbank data centre in Balakovo, in Russia's Saratov region, on the night of 14 October, according to the Saratov governor Roman Busargin. He said several residential buildings were damaged and one person was killed. Sberbank's first deputy chairman Alexander Vedyakhin confirmed the attack on the data centre, saying all Sberbank systems and services were working normally.

The Exilenova+ Telegram channel first reported the strike and said the site was one of Russia's largest data centre projects, planned to become the largest in Europe by 2030. Fire Point, a Ukrainian defence company, also said the Balakovo steel plant was hit. The governor said all infrastructure facilities in the city were working normally.

Earlier attacks on Yandex

The Balakovo strike followed Ukrainian drone attacks on three data centres of Yandex, which Ukraine says it carried out in response to Russian attacks on its own data centres. Peskov told reporters it was too early to assess whether users had suffered financial losses from the outages, and said the government was discussing the company's problems.

The company is strong and influential.

Effect on social media bots

Several observers linked the outages to a sharp drop in bot activity on social networks, particularly X. Volodymyr Zelensky said at the Warsaw Security Forum on 12 October that strikes on Russian data centres had affected bots Moscow uses to influence Western public debate.

Suddenly, it has become a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms.

Traffic from Yandex infrastructure fell by about 94% after the third attack compared with the previous month's average, according to Cloudflare Radar data cited by El País. Polish research body NASK, however, found no significant drop in the activity of accounts spreading disinformation in Poland. Its analysis covered 12 full days, from 30 September to 11 October 2026.

Wider context

Sberbank and Yandex are leading Russian developers of artificial intelligence, and Reuters reports both have fallen behind the United States and China. Sberbank's Balakovo facility was reported by RIA Novosti in 2024 to host Russia's most powerful supercomputer, planned to start in 2027. Moscow's defence ministry said on Wednesday morning that it had downed 902 Ukrainian drones overnight.