Over a four-day period, three Yandex data centers were hit by attacks attributed to drones from Ukraine, causing notable disruptions across the company's services. Yandex, often described as the "Russian Google," experienced service degradation in multiple regions of Russia that affected everyday digital services.
What happened?
Reports indicate that drone strikes originating from Ukraine struck Yandex's infrastructure: three data centers were lost or attacked within four days. As a result, several services — including taxi ordering, food delivery, digital payment functions and services built on artificial intelligence — began to experience interruptions.
According to reporting by HVG, the impact surprised many, and restoration will not be straightforward or inexpensive because replacing the damaged infrastructure will incur substantial costs.
Network and bot-traffic data
Measurements from Cloudflare show that bot traffic originating from Yandex's network dropped to just 0.4 percent of a prior two-week peak. After the first attack on the szaszovói data center, traffic still measured at 57 percent of the previous level, but subsequent strikes produced a far larger decline.
It was also reported that certain bot activity on the X social platform decreased following the incidents.
Why this matters
Yandex supports many daily and business functions in Russia, so damage to its data centers has immediate effects on consumer services and segments of the digital economy. The outage highlights that physical attacks on national and large tech providers' infrastructure can cause rapid, wide-ranging consequences for online services.
Further details about the total damage, recovery timeline and specific circumstances behind the attacks were not provided in the available reports and will require additional reporting.
Summary
Drone attacks over four days struck three Yandex data centers, producing partial service outages and a sharp decline in bot-origin traffic measured by Cloudflare. Recovery will be costly, and the incidents underline the vulnerability of critical infrastructure to physical attacks.
