Yandex Metrica and Webmaster Still Down After Drone Strikes on Three Data Centers

For website owners relying on Yandex, the disruption has moved beyond failed taxi bookings and inaccessible cloud files. As of October 13, Yandex Metrica and Yandex Webmaster still show maintenance notices instead of the tools publishers use to track visitors and monitor their sites in search results.

Metrica's usual traffic reports have been replaced by a notice promising that analytics will return. Webmaster, the service used to examine crawling, indexing and search visibility, displays a similar message. Screenshots supplied to FACTUM.PRESS show both notices. The outage follows drone strikes on three Yandex data centers in Russia between October 8 and 11. The company has not announced a firm date for restoring the two dashboards.

Three data centers hit in four days

The first strike hit Yandex's facility in Sasovo, in Russia's Ryazan region, overnight on October 7–8. A fire broke out and the site was taken entirely offline. On October 9, the company reported damage to equipment at a data center in Kaluga. A third attack, overnight on October 10–11, forced the shutdown of its facility in Vladimir.

Yandex confirmed the incidents and said its employees had not been injured. The company has not disclosed the full extent of equipment damage or a timetable for restoring every affected system. The three shutdowns should not be interpreted as evidence that Yandex's entire data-center network has stopped operating.

FACTUM.PRESS has documented the wider impact on cloud services, payments, taxi bookings and other businesses. An earlier analysis of the Sasovo facility examined the two Yandex supercomputers located there and the cost of replacing comparable hardware. Their physical condition remains unconfirmed.

What publishers can—and cannot—see

The immediate problem is straightforward: site owners cannot access Metrica's normal reporting interface to check visits, traffic sources or user activity. Yandex Webmaster is also unavailable for routine checks of indexing, crawl errors and how pages appear in Yandex Search.

Yandex's Webmaster help pages acknowledge that infrastructure problems have also affected support operations. Replies to inquiries may be delayed.

There is an important technical distinction. A dashboard being offline does not, on its own, prove that tracking tags have stopped transmitting events or that historical analytics have been lost. Data collection, processing, storage and display are separate parts of an analytics service. Nor has Yandex publicly established that every visit recorded during the disruption will appear without gaps when the interface returns.

YandexBot activity also falls sharply

There are signs that the disruption may reach further into the search ecosystem. On October 13, Russian technology publication IT-World cited Cloudflare Radar figures indicating that automated traffic originating from Yandex's network had fallen by more than 90% since October 8. The publication said requests from YandexBot to its own website had dropped by more than 99%.

IT-World observed some recovery in crawling activity by October 13, but said it remained well below earlier levels. These figures describe bot requests seen on particular networks and websites; they do not measure how many pages have disappeared from Yandex's search index.

Yandex Search itself remains operational. Nevertheless, fewer crawler visits can delay the discovery of new stories and updates to existing pages. The scale of any resulting indexing delays has not been independently established.

Advertising tools are recovering, but not all at once

Yandex has begun restoring individual business-facing services. In an October 13 update for advertisers, the company said access had returned to the Yandex Advertising Network partner interface, core Adfox features and agency accounts, although work to restore full functionality was continuing.

Existing Yandex Direct campaigns have continued running, while management tools and reporting have faced restrictions. Progress on the advertising side does not establish that Metrica or Webmaster has been restored.

The outage reaches Russia's government

The failures are now being discussed at government level. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on October 13 that officials were discussing Yandex's problems following the strikes. Reuters reported that he considered it too early to assess users' financial losses or address possible compensation, while saying the company was taking urgent measures to restore services.

The consequences have also crossed Russia's borders. As FACTUM.PRESS reported in its analysis of Kazakhstan's dependence on Yandex infrastructure, disrupted services reached users whose personal data, according to Kazakh officials, is stored locally. Storing data within a country's borders does not necessarily make the applications that rely on it operationally independent.

For website operators, three questions remain unanswered: when they will regain access to analytics and search diagnostics, whether data collected during the outage will be complete, and how quickly YandexBot's normal crawling activity will resume. As of October 13, Yandex had not provided a comprehensive public answer.