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Марія БровінськаWar
18 October 2026, 09:30
2026-10-18
Good drones attacked VK data center near St. Petersburg: users report failures, part of the city was left without electricity
On the night of October 18, drones attacked infrastructure in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region of Russia. According to OSINT analysts, the data center of the social network VKontakte and the nearby 330 kV Vostochnaya electrical substation were hit. After the attack, users began reporting outages in the work of VK and related services, and power supply was lost in parts of the city and region.
On the night of October 18, drones attacked infrastructure in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region of Russia. According to OSINT analysts, the data center of the social network VKontakte and the nearby 330 kV Vostochnaya electrical substation were hit. After the attack, users began reporting outages in the work of VK and related services, and power supply was lost in parts of the city and region.
This is reported by RBC-Ukraine, ASTRA and other media and Telegram channels.
What is known about the attack on the VK data center?
According to the Russian independent publication ASTRA, OSINT analysts analyzed videos sent by eyewitnesses and concluded that one of the targets of the attack was the VKontakte data center. The Vostochnaya substation is located next to it, and may also have been hit.
Both facilities are located near the village of Novosergiyevka, Vsevolozhsky District, Leningrad Region, near the administrative border of St. Petersburg.
VK later confirmed a drone attack on a data center in the Leningrad region. At the same time, company representatives stated that its services remain available to users as usual. Thus, reports of problems with the platform do not yet mean that all of the company’s services have stopped working or that the data center is completely out of order.
The main data center of VK ("VKontakte") is located in St. Petersburg (on Tsvitochnaya Street), and the company’s infrastructure facilities are located in the Leningrad Region.
The St. Petersburg site is historically the main one for this social network. It stores user profiles, databases, text messages, news feeds, and media files.
Users report outages on VK
Amid the attack, users massively complained about problems with the social network VKontakte and related services. Monitoring channels, to which RBC-Ukraine refers, reported large-scale outages.
At the same time, at the time of the first reports, no detailed technical report was released on the nature of the data center damage, the number of servers that may have been affected, or the duration of the outages.
There is also no confirmed data that user data was lost as a result of the attack. The mere fact of reports of problems with access to services does not indicate database damage or information leakage.
On October 17-18, a sharp drop in VK traffic was recorded: the line dropped to almost zero. This means either a temporary failure in the data collection of the Cloudflare service itself, or a large-scale failure in the operation of VKontakte, when the service became completely unavailable.
The number of complaints about failures has increased dramatically.
Vostochnaya substation and partial power outage
In parallel with reports of an attack on the data center, residents of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region reported power outages.
According to the analysis of the video published by ASTRA, the 330 kV Vostochnaya substation is located next to the data center. It may also have been hit. The connection between the reports of damage to the substation and power outages in the region requires taking into account official data on damage and emergency outages.
If damage to the power infrastructure is confirmed, it could also have implications for the operation of digital services: data centers require stable power supply, as well as backup power and cooling systems. However, there is currently not enough data to say that the outage at VK was caused by the damage to the substation itself.
Data centers of Russian IT companies have already come under attack
The attack on VK’s infrastructure came amid reports of previous attacks on the data centers of Russian technology companies.
On October 11, Russian technology giant Yandex reported a data center outage in the Vladimir region after a drone attack. According to Reuters, this was one of several incidents of damage or outages of Yandex infrastructure in a short period of time. The incidents affected the availability of some of the company’s services.
Another Yandex facility in Sasov was reportedly attacked on the night of October 8. The following night, a data center in Kaluga Oblast was also reportedly attacked. As a result of these incidents, the company was forced to suspend operations at certain facilities.
On October 14, Ukrainian media reported that drones may have attacked a Sberbank data center in the Saratov region. The facility was described as a large computing complex, the construction of which was still ongoing.
What is known about the night attack on St. Petersburg?
The attack on the data center occurred during a large-scale nighttime drone attack on Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Leningrad Region. RBC-Ukraine, citing monitoring channels, also reported the possible damage to an oil loading port and the introduction of restrictions at airports, including Pulkovo.
The governor of the Leningrad region, Alexander Drozdenko, claimed that Russian air defenses were working and that drones had been shot down. However, reports on the number of drones shot down and the consequences of the attack came from different sources, and there was no independent verification of all the claims at the time of publication.
Also, according to media reports, the warehouse of online retailer Ozon is also on fire.
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