Drone strikes hit Yandex where it hurts

Yandex is discovering that a datacenter is only “virtual” until something physical explodes near it.

Engineers at the company were still restoring services after Ukrainian drone strikes damaged three of Yandex’s five Russian datacenters, knocking parts of Yandex Cloud offline and leaving Yandex Pay users without access. The Register reported that Yandex’s Sasovo site was “seriously damaged” and shut down completely when the attacks began overnight on October 7-8, with later strikes also hitting facilities in Kaluga and Vladimir.

That matters because Yandex is not one app with a logo problem. It is infrastructure. Its status page showed broad outages across Yandex Cloud, while the company said it was prioritizing heavily used consumer services including Alice, Mail, Maps, Search and Taxi. Priority is another way of saying something else must wait.

The more revealing number came from NetBlocks, cited by The Register: Yandex Cloud’s network connectivity was at 30 percent of normal levels on October 11. That does not tell you how much customer data was lost, what revenue was interrupted or how long recovery will take. It does tell you the damage was large enough to register well beyond a corporate incident page.

Yandex fintech head Dima Pirogov said on Telegram that users’ money was safe, but also said he could not provide a timeline for restoring Yandex Pay. That is an understandable thing to say after an attack on payments infrastructure. It is also the line customers hear when the balance may still exist but access does not. In payments, availability is part of the product.

The episode is also a reminder that cloud resilience has a denominator. “Multi-site” sounds comforting until three of five sites are hit. Yandex told customers to use alternative hosting sites and reserve resources, which is sensible operational advice and a fairly blunt admission that its own platform was running in limited mode.

The Register said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the strikes as a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian datacenters, including one in Kyiv that the BBC reported disrupted internet access for about 100,000 households. The immediate effect in Russia was easier to count: payments offline, cloud degraded, and a company that sells convenience reduced to apologizing for the wait.