Government Says It Helped Yandex Migrate Systems After Data Center Attacks

Russia’s Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev announced on Wednesday that his office provided assistance to Yandex in migrating its core systems to backup servers following the recent Ukrainian drone attacks. Speaking to business news outlet RBC, Shadayev stated that the ministry helped Yandex secure additional sites for relocating key systems.

Yandex had previously claimed it had developed a distributed infrastructure with backup capacities at independent sites for many years. The Ukrainian drone attacks, described by Shadayev as "unprecedented," resulted in damage to three of Yandex’s six data centers last week. The damages disrupted a range of services including search, navigation, food delivery, and banking services, as well as corporate clients on Yandex Cloud, including major retail chains like Lenta and Magnit.

As of Wednesday evening, key Yandex services such as Pay and Cloud were not fully restored. In response to the attacks, a top executive from state telecom operator Rostelecom has been advocating for the construction of geographically isolated, decentralized backup data centers to mitigate the vulnerabilities exposed by the Yandex attacks.

Senior vice president Valery Yermakov emphasized the need for a "doomsday" site where services can always be restored if an incident occurs. President Vladimir Putin convened a cybersecurity meeting on Wednesday with Shadayev, state security officials, and top executives. Among the attendees was Sberbank CEO Herman Gref, whose bank’s data center was also hit by drones overnight.

Putin noted that the meeting was not a direct response to the recent attacks, but he urged officials to strengthen national digital defenses against increasing security threats.