Yandex Cloud said it restored over 97% of customer data following drone strikes that damaged at least three of its data centers, but acknowledged 2.84% of data cannot be recovered due to critical equipment damage. The company attributed part of that loss to customers not using its backup tools, and announced it will now enable backups by default on all new virtual machines, alongside opening a new, more resilient availability zone.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-11-12
Yandex confirmed that Ukrainian drone strikes on three of its Russian data centers in October caused permanent loss of 2.84% of customer data, since the affected systems lacked backup copies. Customers who had enabled Yandex Cloud's backup tools retained their data fully. In response, Yandex will make automatic backups the default setting for new virtual machines and is launching a new availability zone, ru-central1-f, at a separate location.
hardware.slashdot.org
· 2026-11-11
Ukrainian drone strikes have damaged Russian data centers belonging to Yandex, Sberbank, VKontakte and the Ministry of Finance, prompting Russian firms to explore underground facilities. State telecom Rostelcom is in talks with mining company Norilsk about relocating centers below ground, and a regional governor has proposed building them in open-pit coal mines disguised with parks above. Putin also signed a decree on November 2 requiring operators to reserve 10 percent of capacity for emergency state use, and authorized potential reliance on foreign data centers.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-11-03
President Vladimir Putin has directed non-state-owned data centers across Russia to set aside 10% of their capacity for state IT infrastructure, to be released on 24 hours' notice via a new government commission. The order follows Ukrainian drone strikes that damaged Russia's largest data center and the finance ministry's facility, disrupting services like Yandex Mail and tax databases.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-11-02
Between October 8 and 18, Ukrainian drone strikes hit five Russian data centers, including three Yandex facilities housing its top supercomputers, plus sites serving Sberbank and VKontakte. The attacks disrupted cloud services, banking, e-commerce and ride-hailing across Russia, following earlier Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers that knocked out internet and TV broadcasts.
tech.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-23
Ukraine has carried out drone attacks over the past week targeting several of Yandex's major data centers, disrupting Russian consumer apps including shopping and taxi services in major cities. A Cloudflare report found that while the attacks caused real service outages, Russian bot-driven disinformation traffic was not eliminated but instead shifted to other hosting providers.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-16
Cloudflare's analysis found that after Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers cut Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud traffic to 10-15% of normal levels, malicious bot activity largely migrated to other hosting providers such as Radist and Selectel rather than disappearing. Gambling-sector bot traffic rose slightly overall (167.7 million to 170.1 million requests, +1.4%), and Russian-origin social media bot activity fell only marginally, by 0.6% to 5.7% depending on the metric.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-15
Following reported Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex facilities between October 7-11, traffic on Yandex's two autonomous systems collapsed by up to 99%. Cloudflare's analysis found the drop on Yandex Search mostly reflected legitimate search crawlers going offline, while on Yandex.Cloud, malicious automated traffic such as vulnerability scanning largely relocated to other hosting providers rather than disappearing.
blog.cloudflare.com
· 2026-10-14
Ukrainian drones struck three data centers operated by Russian tech giant Yandex over four days, knocking facilities offline and disrupting services relied on by banks, retailers and consumers. One targeted site, in Sasovo, held tens of thousands of servers along with two supercomputers used to train Yandex's AI models.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-14
President Zelenskyy claimed last Monday that Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian data centers belonging to Yandex had reduced disinformation and hate on social platforms. However, tracking account antibot4navalny reports bot traffic remains unchanged, and analyst Valdemar Osted says interactions on MAGA and AfD-affiliated accounts have actually risen since the strikes. Charts circulating online that purport to show a decline in bot activity appear to be AI-generated.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-13
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last week's three strikes on Russian company Yandex's data centers reduced bot activity across social media, saying platforms felt less divisive and less manipulated as a result. Separately, X users and tech commentators noted that Elon Musk's post engagement numbers dropped sharply in the days following the strikes, with daily like averages falling from tens of thousands to under 5,000 on some posts.
futurism.com
· 2026-10-13
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said attacks on Russian data centers reduced social media bot activity. Reports noted that automated traffic linked to Yandex dropped by 94% following the strikes, though the cause of that drop is disputed.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-10-13
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