Yandex shut its Sasovo data centre and shifted workloads after an attack

At 01:44 Moscow time Cloud Alerts reported a power problem. Yandex later confirmed a drone attack, fire and shutdown of the data centre: a facility housing servers. It reported no injuries.

At 08:26 other zones worked, with limits on new resources. At 13:27 Yandex 360 told Kommersant Mail problems were resolved.

Yandex could not confirm whether Sasovo equipment could be repaired

Reuters described the facility as one of Yandex’s five major data centres, housing tens of thousands of servers. The company did not clarify the condition of two AI-development supercomputers located there.

The following day, Pulse dating-app operator Alexander Savitsky told Reuters all 8,000 users had lost access since 8 October. Its Yandex Cloud backup database was also inaccessible; he had no confirmation of data loss.

Yandex reported damage to its Kaluga data centre on 9 October

In a statement to Meduza, Yandex specified that several modules were completely disabled. It warned of possible service disruption without naming particular applications in that statement.

Yandex’s official notice said employees in Kaluga were unharmed. Infrastructure assessment and recovery work continued; that notice did not announce a complete shutdown of the entire Kaluga facility.

Selectel, K2Cloud and VK Cloud are helping Yandex Cloud customers move services

Yandex told Vedomosti the assistance included simpler onboarding and flexible financial terms. External clouds offered capacity for applications affected by attacks on Yandex facilities.

Selectel’s instructions, updated on 13 October, identify a practical limit: spare capacity is not available in every location. Customers unable to download a virtual-machine image from Yandex Cloud are directed to await operator updates or follow its recovery guidance.

Yandex Cloud entered emergency mode after the Vladimir attack

The operator reported infrastructure damage and no injuries. It described the remaining resources as unstable and warned that technical-support channels might also be unreliable.

At 05:59 Moscow time, the cloud control panel and access management worked, while computing capacity was partly available. S3 file storage supported reads but could fail on writes. Some databases allowed only reading records or remained inaccessible.

Later, Yandex told RBC that Search, Maps, Taxi, Alice and Mail were gradually returning. It deliberately limited some Yandex 360 functions, including Disk, to reduce load and preserve essential operations.

Yandex Pay outage blocked balances, payments and transfers

Yandex Pay and fintech head Dmitry Pirogov said the team checked copies of financial records and found no losses. He explained that records are replicated across data centres.

On 11 October Pirogov gave no restoration deadline. He said operations were returning cautiously, with checks on financial records.

Yandex Pay restored cards and is bringing back transfers

Yandex Pay head Dmitry Pirogov said payments and transfers were restored for some customers. Savings-account operations in Seivy, Faster Payments System transfers and bank-detail transfers were returning gradually.

Pay announced 20% annual interest for existing savings accounts for 11–17 October. It promised not to treat affected payments on its own loans, including Super Split, as overdue.

Super Split is consumer credit for paying for purchases in instalments. Pay’s promise concerns obligations under this product; it does not change loans from other banks.

Yandex waived Cloud and Yandex 360 fees through the end of October

Cloud Alerts said October bills would include usage only through 7 October. Later charges might still appear in the account; the operator promised automatic corrections.

Separately, Delovoy Peterburg reported a Yandex 360 virtual-office fee waiver through month-end for individual and business users. The company continued to warn of disruption and limited functions intended to preserve essential operations.

Yandex warned of fake emails promising to restore cloud data

The warning reported by CNews on 13 October described emails exploiting concern about outages. They could claim that data were damaged or accounts blocked, pressuring recipients to act urgently.

Yandex Cloud’s official guidance says support does not request passwords, verification codes, API keys, card details or remote access through such messages. Service status should be checked in the cloud console and official status page.

Yandex Cloud restored some AI services but retained restrictions

The official Cloud Alerts channel reported that applications could again receive AI model responses through Responses and Chat Completions. SpeechKit, the speech-processing service, fully restored text-to-speech; conversion of speech to text recovered partly.

Workflows, automated chains of AI tasks, and Batch Inference, processing requests in large batches, remained unavailable. Yandex Cloud continued restricting new resources and gave no overall recovery deadline.

Yandex reopens Direct accounts; settings remain locked

Direct manages Yandex advertising. On 14 October, Yandex told RBC that advertisers still could not enter their accounts: balance top-ups required a manager or support. According to Yandex, ads in Search, its advertising network and Maps continued running with the saved settings.

On 15 October, Yandex announced that web and app accounts had reopened following outages after data-centre attacks. Advertisers can start existing campaigns, stop active ones, add funds and set an account-wide weekly spending limit. Some tools remain unavailable, and results may be displayed incompletely.

PromoPages, a service for advertising articles, regained read-through and outbound-click statistics on 13 October. Yandex’s 14 October statement said target-action data from Metrica was still missing. Metrica counts website visits and actions; the statement gave no date for these data to return.

Yandex details Mail and Disk restrictions and offers free document editing

Yandex 360’s 15 October update says Mail refreshes data after a page reload. In a browser, Disk allows individual-file downloads but not whole folders. Telemost’s automatic meeting notes and corporate Wiki’s collaborative editing remain unavailable.

On 13 October, Yandex 360 explained that disabling automatic photo/video uploads and archive downloads reduced load. It also warned of slower support replies and announced free service through the end of October for existing subscribers.

Desktop Documents is an installed text and spreadsheet editor. Its product page lists Windows, macOS and Linux support and offline DOCX/XLSX viewing and editing. Installation requires a Yandex ID login; files are stored on the computer.

Collaborative editing is not yet available in the desktop app; it is supported on the web. The 15 October announcement also says offline changes do not sync automatically: the finished file must be uploaded to the cloud manually.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine had retaliated against Russian data centres

Speaking to reporters, Zelenskyy described Ukraine’s actions as a reciprocal response and declined to disclose full details. Interfax-Ukraine published his remarks that evening; they concerned the rationale for strikes, not internet-service availability.

A more specific statement followed on 9 October: Reuters reported that Zelenskyy confirmed Ukrainian drones had struck the Kaluga data centre. This was a subsequent clarification absent from his 8 October remarks.

Russia’s digital and defence ministries are addressing data-centre protection

Russia’s digital development minister Maksut Shadayev described the data-centre attacks as unprecedented. On 12 October he said his ministry was working with the defence ministry on protecting IT facilities.

Shadayev said backup capacity and equipment distributed across different sites kept some services operating. He thanked companies across the industry for assisting affected operators.

Sber confirmed a Saratov-region data-centre attack and said services worked normally

First deputy chairman Alexander Vedyakhin confirmed the attack on a Saratov-region facility to reporters. Kommersant identified the location and timing as Balakovo, overnight on 14 October.

Sber did not announce outages of banking apps, payments or transfers. Interfax’s report contains no detailed equipment-damage inventory: the normal-service statement does not specify the facility’s physical condition.

TechRadar reports a fall in automated requests from Yandex’s network

TechRadar links to Cloudflare Radar’s automated-request section for AS13238, Yandex LLC’s network. Cloudflare observes requests reaching websites that use its infrastructure. This measures requests from Yandex’s network to those websites. It does not measure all Yandex services, their visitor numbers or all Russian internet traffic.

A request is a program asking a website for something, such as a page’s text. Request counts and user counts are different: one program can request many pages. This chart covers requests Cloudflare classifies as likely automated. That is a technical assessment of behaviour, not a list of program owners.

A bot is software that performs actions automatically. A familiar example is a search crawler: it visits web pages and saves information for a search engine. Yandex documents this crawling and indexing process. But the report provides no breakdown by named bots, so the entire flow cannot be attributed to Yandex’s search crawler.

TechRadar cited 0.4% of a two-week peak. Its article provides no measurement export or dated chart image; the link opens a rolling “last seven days” window. NewsTok could not reproduce the number. It remains TechRadar’s claim, not a verified measure of the decline in all Yandex traffic.

Politics entered our previous wording through the TechRadar author’s caveat: automated requests should not be equated with fake social-media accounts spreading pro-Kremlin messages. The report contains no measurements of those accounts’ activity. It does not report the shutdown of an identified political bot network.

Clarification, 15 October 2026. Our previous headline used the overly broad phrase “falling Yandex traffic”. We have clarified request direction and measurement scope, removed the unverified figure from the summary and replaced the unsupported 11–14 October event range with the source’s publication date, 13 October.

Are Yandex Music and BandLink experiencing problems

In October, musicians and listeners began reporting delayed statistics, problems with release pages and unfamiliar recommendations. Comments from BandLink users on the DownReport monitoring page describe cases where the latest visible data was still dated 6 October. These reports describe individual experiences: the availability of each release and feature needs to be checked separately.

We love Yandex Music and support the team working to restore its services. Musicians also need clear answers about which features are available, whether plays are being recorded and how to plan a new release. The following account draws on platform statements and public observations checked on the evening of 15 October 2026.

For an artist’s team, delayed figures mean more than a static chart. Metrics help assess advertising, track reactions to a song and plan further promotion. When data stops updating, it becomes harder to tell whether audience response has changed or the results simply have not reached the report.

What happened to the infrastructure. In a 9 October statement, Yandex said its Sasovo data centre stopped operating after a drone attack overnight on 7–8 October, while infrastructure in Kaluga was damaged on the morning of 9 October. On 11 October, Yandex Cloud reported the shutdown of its Vladimir site and emergency operation of the cloud platform.

Warnings for artists appeared alongside those updates. On 8 October, BandLink reported problems with analytics and photo uploads. On 11 October, it warned of restrictions affecting features and support. In a joint statement on 13 October, Yandex Music and BandLink linked instability to infrastructure damage.

Why music can play while statistics remain unchanged. Playing a track and displaying data to an artist are different functions. Public discussions contain both access and loading complaints and accounts of continued listening. One playable track does not establish that the artist dashboard works, and one frozen chart does not establish that all music is unavailable.

Under normal conditions, artist analytics updates daily after 20:00 Moscow time with the previous day’s data, according to Yandex’s documentation. Even without an outage, the date of a play and the time its figure appears are different. A last visible row dated 6 October therefore does not by itself establish when the outage began or recording stopped.

Listeners, plays and likes also measure different things. One person can play a track repeatedly. BandLink’s separate page analytics records visits and link clicks: clicking a streaming-service button does not establish that the visitor played the music. These metrics should not be treated as interchangeable when assessing advertising.

The current FAQ reports delayed release availability, unavailable pitching and no fresh Scanner data. Updates to likes and the Chart have resumed.

Pitching means submitting a release for editorial consideration. In the normal process, the material is delivered to the platform first, and the submission is recommended roughly two weeks before release. A temporary interruption is especially consequential for an approaching premiere. The status of an earlier submission needs a separate check.

User comments also report problems with presaves, which let listeners save upcoming music in advance. This is a reason to open the exact page linked from an advertisement and check it. The reports do not establish that every presave has stopped working.

The same FAQ says editorial playlists continue, while social promotion of new music is paused. Existing Impulse campaigns continue; new ones are unavailable.

Are plays being preserved? Yandex says plays are being recorded for settlements. Restored history and financial reports for the specific release will help verify the completeness of accounting.

The consequences for a launch can extend beyond accounting for plays that already happened. If someone follows an advertisement, encounters an error and leaves, a later statistics update does not recover that listening opportunity. Advertising costs, rescheduled promotion and the reporting of plays are separate issues.

Discussions have also suggested that changes to the user agreement mean payments will be refused. Yandex’s general agreement, dated 10 October, includes a force-majeure section covering consequences of drone use. However, it does not disclose the terms of an individual music rights-holder contract and is not an announcement cancelling all music payments.

What is happening to My Wave? In one Reddit discussion, a participant linked unfamiliar recommendations to a possible algorithm rollback. Other users in the same thread said music worked normally for them. The Yandex Music team says its models are protected and recommendations continue operating.

A user can notice a change in a playlist, but one session cannot establish the state of a model or the cause of that change. The publications reviewed provide no technical evidence that My Wave has been destroyed. Equally, preservation of a model does not mean every request to the service is free of delays or errors.

Where did the 2028 forecast come from? On 12 October, JustMedia used that date in a headline citing Izvestia, although the same article referred to weeks or months depending on the damage. In an 11 October Fontanka interview, analyst Eldar Murtazin suggested 2–2.5 years if supercomputers had been destroyed.

That is an estimate for potentially replacing complex equipment, not a date for statistics to return to a musician’s dashboard. In the same interview, TelecomDaily head Denis Kuskov discussed infrastructure problems lasting weeks. Murtazin later told RTVI that basic consumer functions could be partially restored in roughly a week without further attacks. These forecasts concern different recovery tasks.

No exact date for full analytics recovery has been announced. Neither ‘in a week’ nor ‘in 2028’ can be treated as an established BandLink timetable.

On compensation. Yandex Cloud announced free use of cloud services for existing customers in Russian zones for 8–31 October. This is a specific measure for cloud customers. It does not establish compensation for all musicians, refunds of promotion spending or an extension of Plus subscriptions.

What to do before a release. Start by following the listener’s route: open the advertised link, navigate to the intended track and check playback. Ask the distributor about the specific release identifier: has the material been sent, accepted by the platform and made available to the audience?

If the launch depends on presaves and pitching, establish whether those steps can still be completed in time. If music is already accessible through working links, delayed analytics alone does not explain why the entire campaign should stop. Any rescheduling decision should account for the specific restrictions and placements already agreed.

While restrictions continue, retain screenshots of the latest figures, update dates, advertising spending and correspondence about placements. Do not delete or re-upload a release solely because a counter is static without first establishing the status of the existing delivery. On 11 October, BandLink provided a temporary support bot.

Once analytics returns, check not only for new figures but also whether the missing days have been filled in. Then compare listening history with campaign reports and financial statements. Those records will help musicians understand the outcome of a period that is currently only partially visible.