Drone Strikes on Yandex Datacenters Show How Physical Attacks Can Take Cloud and Payment Services Offline

Yandex, often described as 'Russia's Google', is working to restore services after Ukraine launched drone strikes on three of its five Russian datacenters. The strikes began overnight on October 7-8 and seriously damaged the Sasovo datacenter, causing a total shutdown. A second strike on the morning of October 9 hit the Kaluga datacenter and took part of its infrastructure offline.

A third strike hit the Vladimir site, which supports the Yandex Pay payments service. Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex's fintech division, said on Telegram that users' money is safe, but services remained offline a day later. He said the company could not yet give a precise restoration timeline and wants to ensure everything works reliably before bringing the service back. Yandex Pay lets users make online and in-store purchases, pay in installments and split bills.

Yandex said engineers are prioritising its most-used services. Access to the Alice AI assistant, Mail, Maps, Search and Taxi is being restored, while other features remain offline. The status page for Yandex Cloud, its public cloud platform, lists widespread outages. Some customers may be able to reach features such as the Cloud Console and API, but availability is inconsistent across the platform.