Ukrainian drone strikes hit Yandex datacenters in Russia, knocking its cloud and payments services offline. Network connectivity fell to about 30% of normal, and staff are working around the clock to restore access to funds and services.
Yandex engineers are working to restore services after Ukraine launched drone strikes on three of the company's five Russian datacenters. Users are waiting for access to their funds, and network connectivity has fallen to 30 percent of normal.
The strikes began overnight on October 7-8, "seriously damaging" Yandex's Sasovo datacenter and leading to a total shutdown. Ukrainian drones struck again on the morning of October 9, targeting the company's Kaluga datacenter and taking part of its infrastructure offline.
Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex's fintech division, confirmed via Telegram on Sunday morning that a third strike had targeted the company's Vladimir site, which supports Yandex Pay. A day later, services remained offline, although Pirogov said users' money was safe.
"I'm very sorry I can't tell you yet that everything is working again," the executive wrote. "The team continues to restore services and is checking every step. When it comes to your money, it's important to us not just to restore Yandex Pay as quickly as possible, but also to ensure that everything is working reliably.
"I understand that you're not waiting for words, but for access to your money. And I understand how hard it is to wait when you can't use it. We can't give you a precise timeline for the restoration yet, but we promise: we won't stop until the service is back online."
Yandex Pay is the company's digital payments service. Users can make online and in-store purchases, pay in installments, and split bills with friends and family. It is also integrated into online shopping experiences and is comparable to Apple Pay or Google Pay. Yandex more broadly offers services similar to Google's.
Yandex said engineers are prioritizing its most-used services. It reported that access to the Alice AI assistant, Mail, Maps, Search, and Taxi is being restored, but other features remain offline.
The company's status page lists widespread outages across Yandex Cloud, its public cloud platform, following the attacks. Updates from the maintenance team describe partial availability despite the outage indicators. They suggest some customers may be able to access certain features, such as the Yandex Cloud Console and API, but availability remains inconsistent across the platform.
In its most recent update, the company said: "The Yandex Cloud platform is still operating in a limited mode. Our specialists continue restoration work around the clock. The technical support team receives an increased number of requests, so the response time can be increased.
"Our recommendations continue to be relevant. We recommend using alternative sites for hosting and reserving resources."
Internet monitoring organization Netblocks reported that Yandex Cloud's network connectivity was at 30 percent of normal levels on October 11.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the drone attacks were a response to Russia's own attacks, which had targeted datacenters in Kyiv. The BBC reported that in September, Russian drone strikes targeted a business center in the capital, killing four people and damaging a datacenter. That damage left around 100,000 households without internet access.
The attacks had other knock-on effects, such as public transport boards not displaying information in Lutsk.
Ukraine's attack on the Vladimir site on Sunday morning came hours after controversial comments from US President Donald Trump, who accused Zelensky of wanting "to make problems for the world" by continuing to attack Russian oil refineries. Trump went on to say that it was time for Ukraine to elect a new president after Zelensky said measures should not be taken that allow Russia to generate more revenue to fund its war. Zelensky was referring to a deal between Trump and Putin to release diesel from Russia to the US and the rest of the world.
Later that day, the US president claimed Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an "energy ceasefire" to halt attacks on each other's energy infrastructure. Kyiv said it was unaware of the agreement before Trump announced it on his social media platform, but it was willing to halt attacks on Russian energy infrastructure if Moscow reciprocated.
Russia launched a missile attack on a Ukrainian power plant hours later.