Government Says It Helped Yandex Migrate Systems After Data Center Attacks

Russia’s Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev said Wednesday that his office helped tech giant Yandex migrate core systems to external backup servers following last week’s Ukrainian drone attacks.

“The ministry assisted Yandex in providing additional sites for relocating key systems,” Shadayev told the business news outlet RBC.

Yandex maintained that it has “for many years” developed distributed infrastructure and backup capacities at independent sites.

Ukrainian drone attacks, which Shadayev referred to as “unprecedented,” damaged three of Yandex’s six data centers last week. The outages disrupted search, navigation, food delivery and banking services while also affecting corporate clients on Yandex Cloud, including retail giants like Lenta and Magnit.

Key Yandex services like Pay and Cloud did not appear to be fully restored as of Wednesday evening.

Meanwhile, a top executive of state telecom operator Rostelecom stepped up calls for the construction of geographically isolated, decentralized backup data centers to avoid vulnerabilities exposed by the attacks on Yandex.

“Everyone understands today that we need a so-called ‘doomsday’ site, a backup facility where you can always restore your services if something happens,” said senior vice president Valery Yermakov.

President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday convened a cybersecurity meeting with Shadayev, state security officials and top executives, including Sberbank CEO Herman Gref, whose bank’s own data center was hit by drones overnight Wednesday.

Peskov claimed the meeting was not in response to recent “situational” attacks, though Putin urged officials to bolster national digital defenses against growing security threats.

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