Thousands of Russian users reported difficulties accessing VKontakte and its music streaming service over the weekend, following a Ukrainian drone strike on a data center near St. Petersburg. Independent monitoring services logged a surge in complaints and a decline in VK's network connectivity, with NetBlocks measuring connectivity at 56% of normal levels during the incident.
VK confirmed that its facility in the Leningrad region was targeted in the overnight attack on October 18, but denied that the incident had affected its services, saying they remained available as usual. The company did not disclose the extent of the damage or how many servers were affected. Outage-tracking websites Downdetector and Sboy recorded approximately 6,600 and 2,100 complaints respectively on Sunday.
Ukrainian drone manufacturer Fire Point said its FP-1 drones struck the data center, claiming the facility had sustained significant damage and citing previously published figures of more than 20,000 servers in 640 racks. Ukrainian media and open-source intelligence analysts reported extensive damage, including partial roof collapse, though those reports could not be independently verified. Pavel Durov, who co-founded VKontakte, said he had built the data center about 15 years ago and that it was later sold to VK, adding: "They failed to protect it."
The outage is part of a broader pattern of attacks on data centers in both Russia and Ukraine. Earlier in October, Ukrainian forces struck Yandex data centers three times, and a Sberbank data center was also reportedly targeted. Russia has also repeatedly struck Ukrainian data centers, including a recent missile strike that destroyed a Kyiv facility operated by Datagroup.