Ukrainian drone strikes disrupt Russia's internet infrastructure

Ukrainian forces conducted three consecutive drone strikes on Yandex data centers in the Vladimir, Ryazan, and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8, 9, and 11. These attacks caused extensive outages across the Russian internet, affecting both Yandex’s own services and other platforms reliant on its infrastructure.

The strikes temporarily disabled Yandex’s services, including Yandex Go, Yandex Eats, and Yandex Pay, which are widely used by Russians. Other affected services included major banks, retailers, online marketplaces, classified ad platforms, and news websites. Companies such as CIAN, Sports.ru, Magnit, and Vkusno i Tochka relied on Yandex’s infrastructure for data storage.

The attacks disrupted access to essential services, including taxi bookings, online payments, email, and the Alice voice assistant. The scale of the disruption highlights the central role Yandex plays in Russia’s digital infrastructure. According to officials, the company’s data centers were not designed to withstand drone attacks, which were not a primary threat at the time.

Yandex acknowledged that its cloud storage platform, Yandex Cloud, entered emergency mode after the third strike, indicating a lack of spare capacity. Analysts warned that further attacks could worsen the crisis. The company advised users to arrange backup capacity with other providers, such as Selectel, K2Cloud, and VK Cloud, to mitigate the impact of the outages.

Russian law prohibits storing certain data outside the country, limiting the ability of companies to relocate data to foreign servers. This legal framework, including the Yarovaya laws and Federal Law on Personal Data, requires data to be stored within Russia. As a result, Yandex’s infrastructure in Kazakhstan can only handle data for customers in that country, and foreign services like Google Drive remain an uncertain option.