Yandex engineers are working to restore services after Ukraine launched drone strikes on three of its five Russian datacenters. The strikes began overnight on October 7-8, causing "serious damage" to 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, resulting in part of its infrastructure being taken offline. A third strike on the morning of October 10 targeted the Vladimir site, which supports Yandex Pay.
Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex's fintech division, confirmed via Telegram on Sunday morning that services remain offline a day later. "I'm very sorry I can't tell you yet that everything is working again," Pirogov 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." Pirogov assured users their money is safe but could not provide a precise restoration timeline.
Yandex said engineers are prioritizing the most-used services, reporting 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. In its most recent update, Yandex said: "The Yandex Cloud platform is still operating in a limited mode. Our specialists continue restoration work around the clock. 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 strikes, which had targeted datacenters in Kyiv. The BBC reported that in September, Russian drone strikes hit a business center in the capital, killing four people and damaging a datacenter, leading to around 100,000 households losing internet access. The attacks also caused knock-on effects such as public transport boards not displaying information in Lutsk.
The attack on the Vladimir site 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 claimed Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an "energy ceasefire" to halt attacks on each other's energy infrastructure.