Drone Strikes on Russian Data Centers Disrupt Yandex Services Across Central Asia

Ukrainian drone strikes damaged three Yandex data centers in Russia's Ryazan, Kaluga, and Vladimir regions between October 8 and 11, forcing shutdowns and disrupting services across Central Asia. The attacks affected supercomputers used for artificial intelligence development and disabled critical infrastructure.

On October 11, users in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan experienced outages on Yandex Go, Yandex Eats, Yandex Lavka, Yandex Music, Yandex Pay, and Yandex Cloud. Taxi and delivery services were unavailable, drivers could not receive orders, and restaurants lost access to customers.

“Since this morning, inDrive in Kazakhstan has seen a sharp influx of passengers and orders. This creates an imbalance between supply and demand.”

In Kazakhstan, the disruption created a supply-demand imbalance as passengers flocked to competitor inDrive. Founder Arsen Tomsky reported a sharp influx of orders on Threads, stating the company reduced commissions to attract more drivers.

Yandex confirmed no employees were injured and began redistributing computing workloads to operational sites. By the evening of October 11, taxi booking resumed in Kazakhstan, though some functions remained restricted. The company has not provided a definitive timeline for full recovery.

The outages exposed Central Asia's heavy reliance on Russian digital infrastructure. Yandex Qazaqstan noted that while Kazakh users' personal data is stored locally, computing capacity depends on cross-border servers. Reuters linked the strikes to an expansion of attacks on economic infrastructure during Russia's war against Ukraine.