Yandex, Russia's dominant technology company, disclosed that unmanned aerial attacks have damaged three of its data center facilities, resulting in the complete closure of two sites and partial operational degradation at a third. The outages have left many customers unable to retrieve files and access cloud-based services across the platform.
Three data centers sustained damage in the attacks: Sasovo was struck on October 8, Kaluga on October 9, and Vladimir on October 11. The Sasovo and Vladimir locations have ceased all operations, whereas the Kaluga facility continues running at reduced capacity. Ukrainian military forces are believed to be responsible for the coordinated strikes. No casualties were reported from the incidents.
Often described as the Russian equivalent of Google, Yandex operates a sprawling ecosystem of services including search, mapping, navigation, ride-hailing, food delivery, e-commerce, video streaming, email, and cloud infrastructure solutions. The company's platforms serve as critical infrastructure for both government agencies and private organizations throughout Russia.
EU Member of Parliament Tomáš Zdechovský noted a possible correlation between the Yandex service disruptions and a sudden cessation of online activity from accounts spreading far-right propaganda in Germany.
Yandex stated on its status page that personnel are operating continuously to sustain services and support affected clients and business partners, though the company cannot estimate when full restoration will occur. The company has advised customers to shift to alternative infrastructure solutions for backup and recovery purposes.
We consider the remaining resource configuration to be unstable. The platform's operating mode is emergency – we recommend using any other alternative disaster recovery plans. Technical-supported communication channels can be unstable.
Yandex status update
According to the latest status reports, several Yandex services remain operational but with limitations. Console, API, IAM, Container Registry, databases, S3 storage, and Kubernetes are available with some performance degradation. Compute, AI Studio, and security offerings are only partially functional. The Monium service remains completely offline.
One affected customer documented problems beginning October 8, including missing thumbnail data in Yandex Disk backups and inability to download previously stored files. The user encountered HTTP 302 redirects, HTTP 504 Gateway Timeout responses, and HTTP 500 errors when attempting to access or manipulate the files.
Whether data residing in the damaged facilities has been permanently destroyed remains unknown, as Yandex has not addressed data loss concerns in any of its public status communications.