Drone strikes disable three Yandex data centres, disrupting cloud and payments
Ukraine’s drone strikes on three of Yandex’s five Russian datacentres have disrupted the technology company’s cloud platform and payment services. The outages have left some users unable to access Yandex Pay, while the company says customers’ money is safe and engineers are working to restore services.
The strikes began overnight on 7–8 October at the Sasovo site, seriously damaging it and forcing a shutdown. Further attacks on 9 October hit Kaluga, and a third strike targeted the Vladimir site, which supports Yandex Pay; on 11 October, Netblocks measured Yandex Cloud connectivity at 30 per cent of normal. Yandex says access to Alice, Mail, Maps, Search and Taxi is being restored, but its cloud platform remains in limited mode with no firm recovery timetable. Ukraine’s president said the attacks responded to Russian strikes on datacentres in Kyiv.
- Drone strikes hit three Yandex datacentres.
- Yandex Pay and cloud services remain disrupted.
- Cloud connectivity fell to 30 per cent of normal.
New here? Start with this
Yandex is Russia's largest technology company, providing search, email, maps, payment systems and other online services used by millions of Russians. Data centres are facilities containing computer servers that store data and run these digital services; they are essential infrastructure because without them, online services cannot function.
Both Ukraine and Russia have targeted critical digital infrastructure during their conflict, including data centres. Ukraine's military has reportedly struck Yandex's data centres, and Ukraine's government said these attacks were retaliation for Russian strikes on digital infrastructure in Kyiv.
Attacks on data centres that host widely used services disrupt access to payments, communications and other digital tools that civilians depend on. This reflects a broader pattern in the conflict where both sides target each other's digital infrastructure as part of their military strategy.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Ukraine's targeting of Yandex facilities represents a measured response to Russian strikes on Ukrainian datacentres, and can be justified as degrading infrastructure that supports the Russian state's war effort during active military conflict. From this perspective, when an aggressor nation systematically attacks civilian infrastructure in occupied territories, reciprocal strikes on the aggressor's infrastructure—even if used by civilians—constitute a proportionate defensive measure to create deterrence and demonstrate that escalation carries costs.
The case against
Yandex is a civilian company serving millions of ordinary Russians' essential daily needs including payments, email, and data storage, making these datacentres fundamentally civilian infrastructure despite any tangential state connections. International humanitarian law protects non-combatants and civilian infrastructure; deliberately disrupting services that ordinary people depend upon—regardless of prior Russian strikes—disproportionately harms innocent civilians rather than military targets and perpetuates an escalatory cycle that damages civilians on both sides without advancing either nation's legitimate security interests.
Read the full article at the source →
Originally published by The Register as “Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex datacenters knock cloud and payments offline”.