Strikes on Yandex data centers disrupted more than 80 Russian services

Ukrainian drones carried out three consecutive attacks on Yandex data centers, causing disruptions to more than 80 of the company's digital platforms and third-party but related resources, such as banking apps and ride-hailing services. This is reported by Mezha.

They add that bot traffic from Yandex's network fell almost to zero.

As reported by Tom's Hardware, citing Cloudflare data, on October 8, when the Yandex data center in Russia's Sasovo, where two supercomputers are located, was damaged, bot traffic from this network fell to about 57% of its peak. On October 9, the company's larger data center complex in Kaluga was knocked out, and on October 11, the one in Vladimir. As a result, bot traffic dropped to 0.4% of the maximum level recorded over the previous two weeks.

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Yandex, which some call the "Russian Google," powers hundreds of internet services, including the eponymous search engine and cloud platform. As reported by KyivPost, the attacks disrupted at least 80 functions, including the voice assistant Alice, the Yandex.Music platform and Yandex Smart Home, the Telemost video conferencing tool, as well as Compute Cloud, Object Storage, Managed Kubernetes, PostgreSQL and ClickHouse, and the YandexGPT, SpeechKit and Vision OCR APIs.

The attack also affected third-party commercial platforms in Russia and neighboring countries. Users reported connection problems in banking apps, ride-hailing services and large retail chains such as Fix Price.

Recall that Western intelligence services warned heads of defense agencies in European countries about the growing threat from Russia. According to the Financial Times, Russian intelligence services may target executives and employees of defense companies, including manufacturers of drones and their components.