Ukraine has struck three of the six data centers belonging to Yandex, a Russian technology company, in Sasovo (Ryazan region), Kaluga, and Vladimir. Kyiv called the strikes a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers, which Russian forces have been striking lately. The infrastructure of the company’s “iron heart,” as Yandex calls its data centers, has been damaged. Operations at two of them — in Sasovo and Vladimir — have been halted. At the data center in Kaluga, “several modules have been completely knocked out.” Outages have plagued the Russian internet since the strikes began: not only Yandex’s services but also the websites of other companies and even media outlets have been operating with restrictions. Users abroad have also complained about problems with Yandex’s apps. As of October 12, the company had not managed to restore their operation. Here’s a look at the consequences of the Ukrainian strikes that Yandex and its users have faced.
How the strikes on the data centers affected the company and its users
- Since the first attack on Yandex’s data centers on October 8, users have complained about outages in the company’s services, including Mail, Pay, Disk, Go, and others. The strikes also disrupted Yandex Cloud for its clients. In recent days, there have been reports (1,2,3) of problems accessing other companies’ websites and services: the app for the cafe chain Vkusno i Tochka, media websites, the Pulkovo airport, and continuous glucose monitoring services used by people with diabetes.
- Russians have been especially vocal in their complaints about problems with Yandex Pay, after some users reported on social media that all their funds had been frozen. “All my money’s on Yandex, so I have no money for food,” one affected user said. Yandex tried to reassure users, saying their funds were safe, though the company could not say when everything would be working again.
- The outages affected Yandex users outside Russia as well. People in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan were unable to order taxis and food, and similar problems were reported in Armenia, Belarus, and Serbia.
- Three of Yandex’s supercomputers are located in the data centers hit by the strikes. The company uses them, among other things, to train its artificial intelligence models, and their fate remains uncertain.
- Cybersecurity experts said Russian bot traffic dropped by almost half, to 49% of its usual level, after the strikes on Yandex’s data centers. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, there has been “less hatred and provocations” on social media since the strikes because there are fewer bots.
How Yandex responded
- After the first strike, Yandex warned users of possible outages. On October 11, the company announced it had restored access to Alice (its AI assistant), Search, Maps, Mail, and other services, though not all features were working again.
- Yandex restricted downloads from its Yandex Disk cloud storage to “maintain the functionality” of other services, as engineers focus first on restoring the most popular services.
- After navigation outages, Yandex Pro advised drivers working with Yandex Taxi to use Google Maps or the navigation app Waze, which is also owned by Google.
- Yandex arranged to move customer data and services to data centers operated by cloud providers VK Cloud, Selectel, and K2Cloud.
- After the strikes, Yandex added a clause to its user agreement exempting the company from liability in cases of force majeure, including attacks by Ukrainian drones.
What company employees, analysts, and market participants are saying
- “Things are bad. I don’t think we’ll come out of this night without losses. Some [of the capacity] definitely won’t be restored at all,” one of The Bell’s sources at Yandex said after Ukraine’s first attack on the Sasovo facility.
- Replacing the damaged equipment is expected to take about six months, and Yandex will have to buy new equipment “on the most expensive market in recent years.” The additional cost will ultimately push up prices for customers’ cloud services.
- After the first strikes, Yandex shares on the Moscow Exchange fell more than 7.6%. Experts say the company’s business has a sufficient margin of safety, but its main risk is rising spending on protection, backup capacity, and infrastructure redistribution if the strikes continue. A second risk is disruption to Yandex’s cloud infrastructure and corporate solutions, which could affect customers’ businesses.
- Amid the attacks on Yandex, other data center owners have begun taking measures to protect their infrastructure, including purchasing equipment to defend against drones. Those added costs could make data center services even more expensive.
- Yadro, an X Holding subsidiary, could profit from protecting Russian data centers from drones. The holding’s deputy general director is Boris Korolev — the son of Sergei Korolev, first deputy director of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Yadro supplies mobile data processing centers, demand for which has grown since late summer, as the industry has discussed the inevitability of Ukrainian attacks on Russian data centers since around that time. Russia has more than 250 data centers in total, a significant portion of which are located in Moscow and neighboring regions.
What authorities and propagandists are saying
- The Kremlin has not commented on the strikes on Yandex. Russia’s digital development minister called the attack on Yandex “unprecedented,” and the ministry is discussing data center protection with the Defense Ministry. The State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, said the responsibility for protecting data centers lies with the companies themselves.
- Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, a Russian state propaganda outlet, complained on her Telegram channel about outages at Yandex. “They won’t stop sending me requests and confirmations to prove I’m not a robot. I’m not a robot!” she explained. Simonyan threatened to switch back to Google or move to China’s DeepSeek. She soon deleted the post.
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