- Kaspersky's VPN, Password Manager, Safe Kids, and My Kaspersky portal failed worldwide from October 11 to roughly October 14
- The outage began hours after Ukrainian drones shut down Yandex's Vladimir data center, but no technical link has been shown between the two
- A viral post calling Kaspersky "practically dead" was wrong on database updates, lost passwords, and its Europe-only framing - the effect was global and temporary
Kaspersky customers worldwide recently spent several days unable to use the company's VPN, Password Manager, Safe Kids parental controls, or My Kaspersky account portal, after an outage began within hours of Ukrainian drones forcing a third Yandex data center offline.
The company has blamed technical issues and has not named an underlying cause - but the overlap with the strikes on Russia's biggest tech firm has been hard for users to ignore.
On October 15 2026, Riga-based commentator Professor Talk (@SergejTalk) told his followers that European users were finding Kaspersky's antivirus "practically dead," with database updates failing, the password manager gone along with its contents, and the VPN wiped out.
Many of those claims don't hold up to the record; the outage itself, however, was real, global, and lasted the better part of four days, but it did point to a potential connection to Russian hosting for many of Kaspersky's key services.
Locked out on four continents: Bad timing or something more?
The first complaints landed on Kaspersky's support forum early on Sunday, October 11, when a user reported the VPN refusing to connect on both PC and phone. Within a day, the thread had drawn reports from Malaysia, Brazil, Italy, Vietnam, Spain, Germany, Iraq, the UK, and Australia, while users in Japan described failed activations and an unreachable VPN on X.
As a result, on October 12, Kaspersky employee and forum moderator Danila T. confirmed that some features in Kaspersky products and on My Kaspersky were temporarily unavailable, naming VPN, Safe Kids, and Password Manager, and said protection and user data were unaffected.
A later notice, relayed in French by moderator Berny, said the VPN problems hit the app on every supported operating system, and that licenses bought from October 10 onward could face activation delays. Kaspersky said it would extend affected subscriptions automatically to cover the lost time.
The staff, while in damage-control mode, also told users not to uninstall or reinstall applications, noting that the activation service issues would essentially lock them out of the applications altogether.
Service came back in stages. Berny reported My Kaspersky was reachable again on the evening of October 13; users said the VPN was connecting by the morning of October 14, and Danila T. posted that day that "the VPN issue should now be resolved."
The timing is what has people talking. Drones struck Yandex's Sasovo data center in the Ryazan region overnight on October 7 to 8, partially disabled its Kaluga site on October 9, and forced the complete shutdown of its Vladimir facility overnight into October 11.
Yandex Cloud was placed into emergency mode, and customers were advised to activate their own disaster recovery plans. We reported Yandex search traffic collapsing as the company's central Russian cloud zones went dark.
Correlation, not proven causation
A detailed incident timeline published on Habr puts the Vladimir power failure between 04:00 and 06:08 Moscow time on October 11, close to when Kaspersky VPN users began reporting problems. Kaspersky's own notice flagging licenses bought on October 10 also falls within a window when two Yandex sites were already damaged.
This is correlation, not causation, and Kaspersky has not said any consumer service runs on Yandex Cloud; none of the reporting to date, including Günter Born's blog and WinFuture, has produced technical evidence that one does.
WinFuture has noted that it remains unclear whether Kaspersky still depends on Russian data centers. Yandex's collapse also knocked over more than a dozen unrelated third-party services, according to The Record, from retailers to the Russian arm of TikTok, so a coincidental fault elsewhere would struggle to stand out.
The same week also reminded everyone how quickly such links harden online often without actual grounding in facts. Viral claims that the strikes had silenced Russian troll farms drew a rebuttal from OCCRP senior editor Ilya Lozovsky, who said they have "no basis in fact", noting the Cloudflare data in question measured automated crawlers rather than social media bots.
Irrespective of what is true here, the timing of Kaspersky's services going offline coinciding with Russian data centers going offline is a worrying one for an EU that is already looking to develop its own data security infrastructure and is trying to wean its users off 3rd-party services of what could in the future be an adversary.
The wider data center war shows no sign of easing. Russian strikes damaged at least six Ukrainian data centers in late September, and Ukraine's current strikes are seen as a tit-for-tat measure rather than an escalation.
For retail customers of Kaspersky's services inside or outside the EU, the practical lesson is narrower: Local protection kept working, which matters most for antivirus software.
But anyone leaning on the company's VPN or cloud-synced password manager has just seen how a disruption far from their own machine can take those tools away for days. Those who want a reliable plan B can find alternatives in our guide to the best antivirus software or the best VPN solutions for their specific use cases.