Drone Strikes on Yandex Datacenters Expose Cloud Fragility

Ukrainian drone strikes have severely disrupted the operations of Yandex, the Russian company often compared to Google. As first reported by The Register, attacks beginning overnight on October 7-8 targeted three of the company's five datacenters.

The strikes caused a total shutdown of the Sasovo datacenter and partially took the Kaluga datacenter offline on October 9. Dima Pirogov, the head of Yandex's fintech division, confirmed via Telegram that a third strike hit the Vladimir site, which supports the Yandex Pay digital payments service. While Pirogov stated that users' funds are safe, he could not provide a precise timeline for full restoration.

Beyond payments, the attacks have crippled Yandex Cloud, the company's public cloud platform. The Register reports that Yandex's status page indicated widespread outages, with the company advising customers to use alternative hosting sites. Data from the internet monitoring organization Netblocks showed that Yandex Cloud's network connectivity had dropped to 30 percent of normal levels by October 11.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky described the strikes as a response to Russian attacks on Kyiv datacenters. The BBC reported that a Russian strike on a Kyiv business center in September killed four people and damaged a datacenter, resulting in the loss of internet access for approximately 100,000 households and disrupting public transport boards in Lutsk.