Russian brewers and soft drink makers have warned retailers of delivery delays after drone strikes on Yandex's data centres knocked out the software they use to label goods, RBC reported on October 12.
The Association of Beer, Malt and Beverage Producers (APP), whose members account for about 70% of the market, said in a letter to the Association of Omnichannel Retail Companies (AKORT) that brewers Baltika and Napitki Vmeste, the former AB InBev Efes, were hit first. The trouble is at Utrace HUB, a marking service hosted on Yandex Cloud, which producers use to apply labelling codes and send data to the state monitoring system.
The disruption shows Ukraine's campaign against Russia's civilian economy reaching companies that were never targets. Beer and soft drinks must carry digital codes registered in the state Chestny Znak (Honest Sign) tracking system before they reach shops, and the commercial services that feed it, such as Utrace, run in data centres like Yandex's. Drones hit Yandex sites at Sasovo in the Ryazan region on October 8, Kaluga on October 9 and Vladimir on October 11.
APP executive director Vyacheslav Mamontov asked retailers to treat the outage as force majeure and not to impose contractual penalties for late deliveries. Producers have agreed with the system operator to ship manually in the meantime, and Utrace expects to restore its service by October 16. Shipments cannot simply stop, Mamontov argued, because shelves have to be stocked and regional budgets depend on the excise revenue.
Soft drinks are affected too. Multon Partners, the former Coca-Cola HBC Eurasia bottler, told retail chains on October 12 that its marking system had been failing since 04:00 Moscow time on October 11 because Utrace was unavailable, Fontanka reported. It asked chains not to fine it for late deliveries and said it was moving data and applications to backup hosting.
PepsiCo Holdings warned stores on October 11 that data exchange between its marking system and Chestny Znak had broken down, leaving it unable to generate electronic transfer documents. It asked them to accept goods against paper documents and promised the electronic versions within 48 hours, failing which the goods would be returned.
Electronic paperwork was hit as well. Document flow operator Kaluga Astral reported disruption to electronic reporting, document exchange and electronic transport documents from October 8, which it blamed on the fire at a Yandex data centre. Some brewers working with it have been unable to issue waybills since October 12, Igor Khavsky, who chairs the brewing commission of small business lobby Opora Rossii, told trade publication Shopper's. Software house 1C, whose own document and reporting services failed on October 11-12, said transport documents can be issued on paper during the outage under transport ministry rules.
Utrace chief executive Sergei Ignatkin told TASS the service was partly restored and work on full recovery was continuing around the clock. Revaz Yusupov, deputy chief executive of CRPT, which operates Chestny Znak, said the state system itself was "functioning without failures", TKS.ru reported on October 13. AKORT said the problems were localised and there were no grounds for shortages, while retailers said goods were still arriving but being processed by hand.
Drinks makers were not the only casualties. Pizza chain Dodo Pizza, electronics retailer M.Video and grocers Lenta and Magnit were also hit by Yandex's problems, and disruptions were recorded in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, New Retail reported. Yandex has agreed with rival cloud providers VK Cloud, Selectel and K2Cloud to speed up moving clients' data, but replacing the destroyed servers could take up to six months, market sources told Kommersant.