Drone Strike Hits Russia’s VKontakte Data Center, Knocking Services Offline as St. Petersburg Faces Blackouts

A major overnight drone attack struck a data center belonging to Russia’s largest social network, VKontakte (VK), near St. Petersburg on October 18, disrupting digital services and coinciding with widespread power outages across parts of the city and surrounding Leningrad region.

The attack targeted VKontakte’s data infrastructure alongside several other facilities in the region, including a major electrical substation and an oil terminal. Russian users subsequently reported significant disruptions to the social network and related online services.

The targeted data center is located in Novosergievka, in the Vsevolozhsky district of Russia’s Leningrad region, just outside St. Petersburg. The facility contains four server halls, approximately 640 server racks, and more than 20,000 servers, making it a significant component of VKontakte’s digital infrastructure.

The complex is located next to the 330-kilovolt Vostochnaya electrical substation, which was also reportedly struck during the attack.

Following the overnight strikes, parts of St. Petersburg and the surrounding Leningrad region experienced electricity outages, raising questions about the extent of the damage to the area’s power infrastructure.

At the same time, users across Russia began reporting problems accessing VKontakte and associated services. According to data from the Russian outage-monitoring platform Sboy.RF, complaints about VKontakte increased sharply between 3:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. local time on October 18.

The exact scale of the disruption remains unclear, and it has not been independently established whether the reported outages resulted from direct damage to the data center, interruptions to its electricity supply, or other technical failures.

VKontakte is Russia’s largest domestic social networking platform and a central part of the country’s digital ecosystem, serving tens of millions of users. Its parent company, VK, also operates a range of digital products, cloud services, and online platforms.

The reported attack on VKontakte’s infrastructure was part of a broader overnight wave of drone strikes around St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov confirmed that the Petersburg Oil Terminal had been hit, with a fire breaking out in its oil storage area.

The terminal is a major facility for handling and storing petroleum products, with 32 storage tanks and a combined capacity of approximately 442,000 cubic meters.

The reported strike follows earlier attacks on three Yandex data centers in Russia between October 8 and 11. According to Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, activity among suspected Russian disinformation accounts dropped by nearly 84% following the first strike, highlighting the potential impact of data center disruptions on Moscow’s online influence operations.

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