Ukraine Drones Take Out Three Yandex Datacentres, Payments and Cloud Still Limping
Three of Yandex's five Russian datacentres have been hit by Ukrainian drone strikes, leaving the company's cloud platform crippled and its payments service offline for days.
The first strike came overnight on October 7-8, doing serious enough damage to the Sasovo facility that engineers had to shut it down entirely. Another wave hit the Kaluga site on the morning of October 9, taking parts of its infrastructure with it. Then, on Sunday morning, the Vladimir datacentre — which underpins Yandex Pay — took a third hit.
Dima Pirogov, who runs Yandex's fintech division, broke the news on Telegram and tried to strike a reassuring tone. "I understand that you're not waiting for words, but for access to your money," he wrote, acknowledging what everyone already knew: telling customers their funds are safe doesn't help them actually spend those funds. As of Monday, Yandex Pay remained offline.
Yandex Pay is Russia's answer to Apple Pay or Google Pay — digital payments for online shopping, in-store purchases, split bills, and instalment plans. For a lot of users, it's not exactly optional.
The company says engineers are triaging by traffic volume, so Alice (their AI assistant), Maps, Search, Mail, and Taxi are being brought back first. Yandex Cloud, the public-facing cloud platform, is a different story. Netblocks reported it was running at roughly 30 percent of normal connectivity on October 11. The company's own status page confirmed widespread outages across the platform, while maintenance updates hedge carefully — suggesting some users might reach the Cloud Console or API, but don't count on it.
The company's official line: "The Yandex Cloud platform is still operating in a limited mode. Our specialists continue restoration work around the clock." They've also told customers to look at alternative hosting and reserve their resources elsewhere in the meantime.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky framed the strikes as direct retaliation. In September, Russian drones hit a business centre in Kyiv, killing four people and knocking out a datacentre that left around 100,000 households without internet. The knock-on effects stretched as far as public transport information boards going dark in Lutsk.
The timing of Sunday's Vladimir strike was awkward politically. It came hours after Donald Trump publicly accused Zelensky of trying to "make problems for the world" by continuing to strike Russian oil infrastructure, and suggested Ukraine should hold elections to replace him. The backdrop: Trump and Putin had reportedly been discussing a deal to release Russian diesel to the US and global markets, which Zelensky had publicly criticised.
Trump later claimed Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an "energy ceasefire" — a mutual halt on attacking each other's energy infrastructure. Kyiv said it hadn't been consulted before Trump announced this on social media, but indicated it would go along with the deal if Russia did the same.
Russia then launched a missile strike on a Ukrainian power plant.