Abstract:
On October 14, the Financial Times reported that Ukraine’s attack on the Russian technology giant Yandex’s data center has thrown many key aspects of Russia’s daily life into chaos, disrupting services ranging from email and taxi apps to dating websites and even electronic access control of Moscow apartment buildings.
Yandex Moscow Office
In the past week, attacks in Ukraine severely damaged three of Yandex's six data centers, causing chaos in Russia. Russia's tech ecosystem is highly dependent on this giant company, which has close ties to the government. Yandex was founded as a search engine in 1997 and has grown into a Russian technology giant that integrates the businesses of Google, Uber, Amazon and OpenAI.
Thousands of companies rely on Yandex's infrastructure, which means that the attack in Ukraine not only affected Yandex's own services, but also affected a large number of companies not directly related to it. The Yandex outage follows a wave of Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries this summer that forced millions of people to queue at gas stations for hours.
Ukraine said the attack was retaliation for Russia’s attack on Ukrainian data centers. But the shock to Russia has been far more severe, exposing the vulnerabilities created by the Kremlin's long-term push to centralize and tighten control over the information technology industry. Most of these initiatives revolve around Yandex. In 2024, Yandex was forced to sell to investors linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"Russia has become a victim of its own policies... This has led to the worst possible situation." said Alena Epifanova, a researcher at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Digital life paralysis
Russians already have difficulty accessing their Yandex mailboxes, opening work documents or booking taxis. In some cities, timetables disappeared from bus stop displays. Residents of many Moscow apartment buildings find themselves unable to access shared courtyards because gates are operated by a company that relies on Yandex infrastructure.
Yandex Pay is a banking and payment service that quickly gained popularity after Apple Pay withdrew from Russia. Users of the service woke up to find their account balances gone. However, Yandex insists that "the funds are safe." Meanwhile, hundreds of websites have been operating intermittently, including Twinby, Russia's leading dating app, and Vkusno i Tochka, a fast-food chain that mimics McDonald's.
Yandex taxi service is not available
A Moscow woman who requested anonymity said she is now unable to use the free accessible taxi service provided by Yandex. Previously, she had been relying on this service to send her 10-year-old disabled child to school. In the past two days, they had to take the subway, which required multiple transfers, and there were few accessible elevators or ramps in the subway.
Some people worry that years of hard work may be wasted. Alyona Zhiganova, founder of travel agency Proadventure, choked back tears in a video posted on Facebook: "I lost a website that had been running for 10 years. All the databases, photos and reviews are probably gone." She had previously used a US cloud service provider, but the service ceased operations after Russia's conflict with Ukraine in 2022.
When will it be restored?
Yandex’s entire ecosystem relies on six data centers, two of which were completely paralyzed in the attack, and multiple modules of the third were also damaged.
Yandex has not disclosed how long the repair work will take. A person close to the company's management said they hope to restore "functionality" "as soon as possible" but did not give a specific timetable. This means that all services will be back up and running, just "at a slightly slower pace than usual." However, the person said it would take several months to restore "full operational capabilities."
Russia's digital minister said on Tuesday that authorities would "protect these facilities," underscoring the seriousness of the situation. Putin recently put the responsibility for preventing drone attacks on companies themselves and urged them not to seek state support.
Yandex's service outage also affected Russia's neighboring countries. Email, Yandex Pay and websites using the company's infrastructure were all down in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Belarus. Kazakhstan has been particularly hard hit, as Yandex’s market share exceeds 90% in the country’s two largest cities.
For more than a decade, the Kremlin has been working to build a "sovereign Internet," supporting local Russian companies to replace Western ones and putting critical infrastructure under tight control.
In 2014, after Putin made remarks about the Internet being a "CIA project" and "everything goes through American servers," the Russian government forced its companies to store all customers' personal data within the country. Yandex became a central player in this operation and was eventually acquired by a consortium close to Putin in 2024.
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