Ukrainian Drone Strikes On Yandex Datacenters Knock Cloud And Payments Offline
"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:
Yandex engineers are working to restore services after Ukraine launched drone strikes on three of its five Russian datacenters.
The strikes began overnight on October 7-8, "seriously damaging" Yandex's Sasovo datacenter and leading to a total shutdown. Ukrainian drones struck again on the morning of October 9, targeting the company's Kaluga datacenter, resulting in part of its infrastructure being taken offline.
Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex's fintech division, confirmed via Telegram on Sunday morning that a third strike targeted the company's Vladimir site, which supports Yandex Pay. A day later, services remain offline, although Pirogov said users' money is safe.
"I'm very sorry I can't tell you yet that everything is working again," the exec wrote. "The team continues to restore services and is checking every step. When it comes to your money, it's important to us not just to restore Yandex Pay as quickly as possible, but also to ensure that everything is working reliably.
"I understand that you're not waiting for words, but for access to your money. And I understand how hard it is to wait when you can't use it. We can't give you a precise timeline for the restoration yet, but we promise: we won't stop until the service is back online."
Yandex Pay is the company's digital payments service. Users can make online and in-store purchases, pay in installments, and split bills with friends and family.
It's also integrated into online shopping experiences. It is comparable to Apple Pay or Google Pay, while Yandex more broadly offers services similar to Google's.
Yandex said engineers are prioritizing the most-used services, and reported that access to the Alice AI assistant, Mail, Maps, Search, and Taxi is being restored, but other features remain offline.
The company's status page lists widespread outages across Yandex Cloud, its public cloud platform, following the attacks.
Updates from the maintenance team describe partial availability despite the outage indicators. They suggest that some customers may be able to access certain features, such as Yandex Cloud Console and API, but availability remains inconsistent across the platform.
In its most recent update, the company said: "The Yandex Cloud platform is still operating in a limited mode. Our specialists continue restoration work around the clock. The technical support team receives an increased number of requests, so the response time can be increased.
"Our recommendations continue to be relevant. We recommend using alternative sites for hosting and reserving resources."
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