Between October 8 and 11, 2026, drones damaged three Yandex data centers in Russia: in the Ryazan region, in Kaluga and near Vladimir. When the Vladimir site went dark on the morning of October 11, ride-hailing, food delivery, the Alice voice assistant, Yandex Disk and the Yandex Pay wallet stopped working properly, and the failures spread to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Belarus and Armenia.
If you keep money in Yandex Pay, the company says it is safe, but access is coming back gradually, and loan payments due during the outage will not count as late.
What happened, in order
According to Kommersant, a roughly 12 MW site in the Ryazan region, home to two Yandex supercomputers, shut down completely on the night of October 8. On October 9 a Kaluga facility with more than 3,800 server racks and 63 MW of capacity was partly knocked out. On the night of October 11 a roughly 40 MW site near Vladimir, which housed the Galushkin supercomputer, stopped. Vladimir regional governor Alexander Avdeev confirmed a drone attack on an "infrastructure facility" and a fire; Yandex said nobody was hurt.
Yandex Cloud switched to emergency mode and told customers to restore their services with other providers. Kommersant reports it arranged fast-track capacity at Selectel, K2 Cloud and VK Cloud. That is why third-party apps that simply rent Yandex servers, such as the property portal Cian and Dodo Pizza, failed too.
Why everything failed at once
A cloud is split into availability zones: separate sites built to stand in for one another. A large service survives the loss of one zone with barely a hiccup. Here two zones went down within four days: the October 8 fire in Sasovo took out ru-central1-b, and the Vladimir site served ru-central1-a, Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports. With little room left to shift the load, one failure dragged down its neighbors, much like a grid during a blackout. Yandex triaged: search, Alice, maps, taxis and mail came back first, while parts of Disk and Yandex 360 were switched off to free up capacity.
As of October 13 the cloud still runs in "limited mode", with new resources on hold. Yandex made Yandex Cloud and Yandex 360 free for existing customers until the end of October and postponed upcoming personal 360 subscription payments. No date for full recovery has been given.
The money question
From October 11 some Yandex Pay customers could not open the app, transfer money or withdraw savings, although card and payment-sticker purchases worked. On October 13 fintech head Dmitry Pirogov said transfers were returning for some users and that every account record exists in several copies across sites, none of them lost, but gave no date for full recovery. As compensation Yandex raised its savings rate to 20% a year for October 11 to 17 and said loan payments due during the outage will not count as late.
Beyond Russia
In Kazakhstan taxis, food and grocery delivery were unavailable on October 11. The country's digital ministry said servers holding Kazakh users' personal data sit inside the country and kept running, but some components needed for taxi and delivery are hosted abroad. Riders moved to inDrive, and Kazakhstan's competition agency issued that service a warning over surging fares.
