Strikes on Yandex data centres disrupt over 80 Russian services

Three consecutive Ukrainian drone attacks on data centres operated by Russian technology company Yandex have caused disruptions to more than 80 of its digital platforms and third-party but related services, such as banking apps and ride-hailing services. Bot traffic from the Yandex network has also fallen to almost zero.

Source: Tom's Hardware, citing Cloudflare data

Details: Tom's Hardware reported that on 8 October, when a Yandex data centre in Sasovo housing two supercomputers was damaged, bot traffic from the network fell to around 57% of its peak level. On 9 October, a larger Yandex data centre complex in Kaluga was put out of operation, followed by another facility in Vladimir on 11 October. As a result, bot traffic fell to 0.4% of the peak level recorded over the previous two weeks.

Yandex, sometimes described as "Russia's Google", powers hundreds of online services, including its namesake search engine and cloud platform. Kyiv Post reported that the attacks disrupted at least 80 services, including the Alisa voice assistant, Yandex Music and Yandex Smart Home platforms and the Telemost video-conferencing service, as well as Compute Cloud, Object Storage, Managed Kubernetes, PostgreSQL and ClickHouse, along with the YandexGPT, SpeechKit and Vision OCR APIs.

The disruptions also affected third-party commercial platforms in Russia and neighbouring countries. Users reported connectivity problems with banking apps, ride-hailing services and major retail chains such as Fix Price.

Your support on Patreon helps us keep the news free and accessible.