The Sasovo facility in the Ryazan region caught fire overnight on Oct. 8, destroying the site that housed two of the company's three supercomputers. The following night in Kaluga, several modules of Yandex's most powerful data center "completely failed," and overnight on Oct. 11 the Vladimir center went down. The company has not said whether the equipment in Sasovo can be restored.
The Yandex Cloud platform, which serves tens of thousands of clients, was among the casualties. Two of its four "availability zones" were damaged and the cloud switched to emergency mode. According to the BBC Russian Service, the company regularly ran drills for disconnecting one of its six data centers and shifting the load to the rest. But Ukraine struck three data centers, two of which were shut down entirely.
Beyond Yandex's own services, the outages hit outside companies using Yandex Cloud, among them Magnit, Lenta, Pyaterochka, Lamoda, Kinopoisk and Delivery Club. Eldar Murtazin, a lead analyst at Mobile Research Group, told the outlet Fontanka that the cloud's emergency mode meant the company had "run out of reserve capacity" and that "this is an extremely bad sign."
From Oct. 11, users of the Yandex Pay app could not check their balance, transfer money to another bank or make payments on Split and Super Split. In the evening, card transfers partially returned with a 1% commission, but money in the savings product "Save" remained frozen. More than 5,200 comments piled up under a post by Dmitry Pirogov, head of Yandex's fintech arm, from people describing mortgages, credit cards and payments to other banks they had no way to cover.
Super Split holders fear for their credit histories. Other banks, one user wrote, refuse to treat the situation as force majeure. Some said they planned to complain to the Central Bank. On Threads, a conspiracy theory that Yandex deliberately froze the money so clients could not withdraw it at once was reposted dozens of times.
On the morning of Oct. 11, Yandex Go stopped accepting orders normally and the Yandex Pro driver app stopped dispatching them. Yandex Eda and the Yandex-owned Delivery Club were also down. Rivals Vezet and Fasten likewise could not find cars; Business FM suggested they run on infrastructure shared with Yandex. Users wrote on Downdetector that "the city was left without taxis." Yandex restarted taxi and food delivery by Sunday evening; Yandex Pro had not come back online by then.
Overnight on Oct. 12, passengers were stranded at Pulkovo airport: the app was down, an operator suggested waiting, and the taxi desk answered the question "what should I do" with "nothing." One user, unable to summon a car, took a minibus to a bus bound for Moscow, hit a two-hour traffic jam caused by an accident and returned home. When taxis came back online, some rides cost more.
On Yandex Disk, files appear in the list but many will not open or download. On Oct. 11 the company itself cut Disk's functions to keep its other services running. A whole folder cannot be downloaded, and through the desktop app, one user wrote, only 60–70% of a video downloads. People who paid for storage for years write about family archives. Photographers and video editors kept footage from shoots in the cloud and sent it to clients by link; they are now warning clients on Instagram that the links open but the photos themselves do not.
Yandex 360 services were also down: Mail, Documents, Spreadsheets and Telemost. A Telegram user wrote on Oct. 11 that since morning she could not write a letter, reply to one or open files in either her personal or corporate inbox.
In an update to its user agreement dated Oct. 11, Yandex classified attacks "using UAVs, missile weapons and other means of destruction" as force majeure and disclaimed responsibility for the consequences of such incidents.
The outages also affected countries bordering Russia, with internet users in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan reporting that Yandex Go and other services were not working. Yandex advised clients to back up resources on other platforms — Selectel, K2Cloud, VK Cloud. Russian companies, however, are required to store some data exclusively on Russian territory: under the "Yarovaya package," telecom operators must keep all user traffic from the past six months and all its metadata for three years inside the country, and all companies are barred from storing clients' personal data outside Russia.
Discussion on social media about the damage to the data centers focused on the centralized system governing the Russian internet and the cost of restoring capacity amid a chip shortage. By one estimate cited in a discussion, 75% of the commercial and corporate segment of the data-center market is located in the Moscow region. According to the BBC Russian Service, Russia was the first to strike data centers in Ukraine back in mid-September, and the current attacks are a response to those actions.