Damage to three Yandex data centres in Russia caused outages affecting the company’s map, payment, email, cloud computing, taxi and food delivery services. The company said two facilities in Sasovo and Kaluga had been struck by unmanned aerial vehicles on 9 October.
The third data centre, located in the Vladimir region east of Moscow, was also attacked over the weekend and went completely offline on Sunday. Operations at the Sasovo facility came to a complete halt, while part of the infrastructure in Kaluga was taken offline. Yandex said its teams were working around the clock to restore the services.
Impact of the outages in Russia and nearby countries
The attacks also had regional consequences. Nine people were injured in the Kaluga region, while approximately 1,600 customers in the Vladimir region were left without electricity.
Some Yandex applications became available again after brief outages. However, some users continued to experience access problems on Monday, and certain services remained completely unavailable. The company advised some users to turn to alternative platforms until the problems were resolved.
The outages affected not only Yandex’s direct services but also other companies that use its cloud infrastructure. Websites belonging to some grocery stores, fast-service restaurants and home appliance companies in Russia experienced access problems.
Users in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan also reported outages affecting Yandex services. In Yerevan, some users turned to a local competitor to book taxis.
The scope of Yandex’s cloud infrastructure
Founded in the 1990s, Yandex operates a broad digital ecosystem in Russia, ranging from an internet search engine to map and payment services. Yandex Go offers taxi and food delivery services in the same application, while the company’s cloud computing service is used in the digital infrastructure of major companies in Russia.
The Yandex Cloud website says the platform serves more than 64,000 customers. As a result, failures at the data centres affected not only Yandex users but also the websites of companies using its cloud services.
Yandex Pay says users’ money is safe
One of the most visible consequences of the attacks was the outage affecting the Yandex Pay digital wallet service. Dima Pirogov, chief executive of Yandex’s Financial Technologies Division, said users’ money was safe.
Pirogov explained that the money was not held at the data centres and that the facilities housed the servers running the services. He said it was not possible to provide a firm timetable for when the service would fully return to normal, adding that work was continuing.
Ukraine and Russia issue differing statements
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the attacks in a statement on 8 October as retaliation for Russia’s attacks on data centres in Ukraine.
Moscow targeted similar facilities in the Kyiv region last month, causing temporary internet outages in approximately 100,000 households. Russia claimed that the data centres it struck were used by Ukrainian military intelligence agencies.
Moscow prepares protective measures
Russian President Vladimir Putin has not commented on the attacks. Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev said at a State Duma committee meeting that they were working with the Defence Ministry on measures to protect data centres.
Shadayev said the scale of the attacks was unprecedented and that the technology sector was helping to resolve the problems that had emerged.
Delivering replacement equipment to the damaged facilities may take up to six months. This suggests that it may take time for Yandex’s services to return fully and permanently to normal.
