Ukrainian drone attacks cripple Yandex data centers, disrupt Russian internet services
Three consecutive drone strikes on Yandex facilities in Russia have caused widespread outages of online services and may take months to fully recover.
Ukrainian forces carried out a series of drone attacks on Yandex data centers in Russia, striking sites in the Vladimir region on October 11 and earlier targets in the Ryazan and Kaluga regions on October 8 and 9. The assaults knocked out half of Yandex's six major data centers, triggering extensive outages across the Russian internet.
The disruptions halted Yandex's own platforms, including Yandex Go, Yandex Eats and Yandex Pay, and affected numerous third-party services that rely on the company's infrastructure, such as banks, retailers, online marketplaces and news sites. Users reported loss of access to taxis, payments, deliveries, email and the Alice voice assistant.
Yandex classified drone, missile and other weapon attacks as force majeure in an updated user agreement and has placed its cloud platform in emergency mode, indicating that spare capacity has been exhausted. > "We have run out of spare capacity, and that’s a very bad sign," said Eldar Murtazin, lead analyst at Mobile Research Group, speaking to Fontanka.
The company advised customers to secure backup capacity with alternative providers, including Selectel, K2Cloud and VK Cloud, and noted that it maintains a separate server infrastructure in Kazakhstan. However, Russian data-storage laws require many types of data to remain within the country, limiting the options for moving services abroad.
Russian officials have acknowledged the vulnerability of data centers. Deputy Digital Development Minister Yevgeny Filatov had recently called for dispersing facilities deeper inland, and Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev said his ministry was coordinating with the Defense Ministry to improve protection.
Industry analysts warn that restoring the damaged infrastructure could take up to six months, as replacement equipment faces long delivery times. The financial impact is significant; Yandex could lose up to 4 billion rubles in a single day of full outage, and the combined losses of affected companies are estimated in the billions of rubles per day.
The attacks highlight the strategic importance of data centers in the ongoing conflict and may prompt Russian firms to adopt more resilient designs, such as underground shelters, distributed smaller facilities or mobile container-based units.