Russia and Ukraine trade strikes amid doubt over ‘energy ceasefire’

On October 11, Ukrainian forces conducted a series of drone attacks targeting Yandex data centers in Russia's Vladimir region, leading to widespread internet disruptions across the Russian internet. This was the third consecutive attack on Yandex's infrastructure, with previous hits on October 8 and 9 in Sasovo, Ryazan, and Kaluga regions.

The strikes caused outages in Yandex's services such as Yandex Go, Yandex Eats, and Yandex Pay, as well as affecting major banks, retailers, online marketplaces, classified ad platforms, news websites and apps, among others.

The reason behind the extensive damage lies in the fact that too much of the data storage market in Russia depends on Yandex's infrastructure. Yandex did not anticipate drone attacks when designing its data centers, as evidenced by an October 11 update to its user agreement, which classified such attacks as force majeure events and disclaimed liability for their consequences. Two of the three attacked data centers were entirely shut down, making it challenging to restore even some services.

Iran's attacks on Amazon data centers in the Middle East in 2026 serve as a comparison, where customer data stored in specific availability zones in the UAE were permanently lost, and recovery efforts were still ongoing six months later. Currently, at least half of Yandex's major data centers have been affected, with three out of six remaining intact. However, Yandex's cloud data storage platform, Yandex Cloud, switched to emergency mode following the third strike, indicating that it has run out of spare capacity.

Yandex has advised its customers to arrange backup capacity with alternative providers, such as Selectel, K2Cloud, and VK Cloud. This means backing up their data and renting servers in competitors' data centers. Selectel has data centers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Novosibirsk, K2Cloud lists availability zones in Moscow and St. Petersburg, while VK Cloud has four availability zones in Russia and two in Kazakhstan.

Although sending data abroad might seem like an option, Russian companies are legally required to store certain data, such as telecom operators' user traffic and metadata, within the country.