Drone Strikes on Yandex Data Centers Cause Widespread Internet Outages in Russia
Three consecutive Ukrainian drone strikes on data centers of Russian tech giant Yandex in October triggered mass service failures. A full recovery will likely take months.
Overnight on October 11, Ukrainian forces attacked a data center of Yandex, Russia's largest tech company and a major provider of data storage to other businesses, with drones in the Vladimir region. It was the third attack in a row: on October 8 the target was a facility in Sasovo (Ryazan region), and on October 9 one in Kaluga. Each strike caused broad disruption across the Russian internet, affecting the everyday lives of vast numbers of users.
Services affected
The outages hit Yandex's own services, including Yandex Go, Yandex Eats and Yandex Pay. Major banks, retailers, marketplaces, classified ad platforms and news sites that store data on Yandex infrastructure, such as CIAN, Sports.ru, Magnit and Vkusno i Tochka, also went down. Russians could not call taxis, make payments, order deliveries or use the Alice voice assistant.
Why the impact was so severe
The data storage market depends heavily on Yandex, and the company apparently did not plan for drone attacks: on October 11 it updated its user agreement to classify attacks with drones and missiles as force majeure. According to BBC News Russian, Yandex regularly practiced shutting down one of its six data centers and shifting the load to the others. Now three have been attacked, and two of them, in Sasovo and near Vladimir, are completely offline. Yandex Cloud, its cloud platform, has switched to emergency mode, which an analyst said means spare capacity has run out.
What customers can do
Yandex advised clients to arrange backup capacity with competitors Selectel, K2Cloud and VK Cloud. Moving data abroad is not an option for many firms, since Russian law requires certain data, including citizens' personal data, to be stored inside the country.
Recovery outlook
A Kommersant source in the IT industry said replacement equipment can take up to six months to arrive. For comparison, after Iran's spring 2026 strikes on Amazon data centers in the Middle East, data recovery in some UAE zones was still incomplete six months later. Yandex's own losses could reach about 4 billion rubles a day if all services were fully down; the real figure is said to be much lower, but combined with other companies' losses, damage runs to billions of rubles daily.
