Yandex Cloud Outages Cut Customers Off From Stored Files
At the Vladimir data center, specialists arrived after infrastructure damage forced a full suspension, Yandex said in an incident update. No one was injured.
Across its cloud infrastructure, Yandex has shut down two facilities and partially disabled a third. The company says it cannot give customers a reliable restoration timeline.
Yandex is advising customers to use alternative infrastructure for disaster recovery. The warning followed a status update describing remaining resources as unstable and the platform as operating in emergency mode. The company's official incident update said Vladimir's infrastructure was damaged and operations there were fully suspended.
Yandex has six data centers, and attacks affected three of them-half of the company's facilities. Operations stopped completely in Sasovo and Vladimir, while several infrastructure modules in Kaluga were damaged.
Three facilities affected by attacks
The affected data centers are in Sasovo and Vladimir, along with a third site in Kaluga. Sasovo was hit on October 8; Vladimir was hit on October 11. Both facilities stopped operating. The Kaluga site was hit on October 9 and is running with degraded operations. Yandex reported no injuries. The attacks are believed to have been carried out by Ukrainian forces seeking to disrupt operations. Reuters reported that two of the three supercomputers used to develop Yandex's AI model were housed in Sasovo.
Yandex says its teams are working around the clock to maintain services and help customers. Its status page lists Console and API as available, though some services have performance or availability issues. IAM and Container Registry are also listed as available. The same applies to databases and S3 storage, while Kubernetes is listed separately. Compute and AI Studio are partially available; security services are also partially available. Monium remains offline.
By October 11, 84 Yandex services were unavailable or disrupted, including Compute Cloud and Virtual Private Cloud. The platform was still operating in a restricted mode on October 13.
File access and recovery remain uncertain
One customer said problems began on October 8. Backups to Yandex Disk lost their thumbnails, and previously submitted files could not be downloaded. Attempts to open or work with the files returned HTTP 302 redirects. The customer also encountered HTTP 504 Gateway Timeout and HTTP 500 errors.
Yandex is one of Russia's largest technology companies. Its services include search and maps, along with email, cloud storage and business cloud infrastructure. Government and private-sector organizations rely on those services, making the disruption a concern beyond consumer file access. The BBC's coverage of the outages noted reports of problems with Alice and search. Users also reported trouble with maps and email, as well as smart-home devices. On October 11, Yandex said access to some of those services had partly returned, although some features remained unavailable.
NerdsMagazine has also covered a social-platform outage. Yandex's disruption reaches cloud files and infrastructure used by customers and organizations.
EU MEP Tomáš Zdechovský has pointed to a possible connection between Yandex outages and a sudden drop in communication from online accounts promoting far-right ideals in Germany. Yandex has not provided a restoration schedule or said whether data stored in the affected centers has been irreversibly lost.
