Archive image: a Yandex office in Moscow, photographed in May 2019. The photograph does not show the Vladimir data center or the attack. Credit: WikiFido / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Image source.
Yandex said on Sunday, October 11, that it had completely suspended operations at its data center in Vladimir, Russia, following damage caused by a drone attack. According to the company, no one was injured. Emergency teams and specialists were working at the site.
The incident was independently reported by Reuters and AFP. AFP also spoke with users who described difficulties with ride-hailing and payment apps, showing how the disruption affected everyday activities.
Cloud operates with limited functionality
On its official incident dashboard, updated at 15:01 UTC on Sunday, Yandex Cloud said it continued to operate with limited functionality. Teams were continuing recovery work, while support handled requests around the clock.
The company recommended that customers consider other platforms to deploy resources more quickly and provide redundancy. This guidance came from the provider itself during the emergency.
Earlier updates on the same dashboard described different levels of availability across services: some components were operational, while others worked partially or experienced problems. The total suspension announced for the Vladimir center therefore does not amount to a uniform shutdown of every Yandex product.
A series of infrastructure incidents
The new incident followed damage at other facilities. In a statement published on October 9, the company had already reported that its Sasovo center had been seriously damaged during the night of October 7–8 and had stopped operating. In the same statement, it said part of its infrastructure in Kaluga was out of service after another attack.
In that document, the company explained that its data centers support services used by both consumers and businesses, including navigation, entertainment, shopping and customer service. The succession of incidents makes maintaining the availability of those operations more difficult.
What remains unresolved
In the Sunday update consulted, Yandex did not announce a full restoration of the platform. It said recovery work would continue and a new bulletin would be issued on Monday, October 12, at 11 a.m. Moscow time.
