"I'm very sorry I can't tell you yet that everything is working again," Yandex fintech head Dima Pirogov wrote on Telegram as engineers worked to restore services after Ukrainian drone strikes damaged three of the company's five Russian datacenters.
Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir: the timeline of the strikes
The attacks began overnight on October 7–8, when Ukrainian drones "seriously damaging" Yandex's Sasovo datacenter and causing it to shut down entirely. A second wave struck on the morning of October 9, targeting the company's Kaluga datacenter and taking part of its infrastructure offline. Pirogov confirmed on Sunday morning that a third strike hit the firm's Vladimir site, a facility that supports Yandex Pay.
Which services went dark and what users experienced
Yandex reported widespread outages across Yandex Cloud, its public cloud platform, and said engineers were prioritizing the most-used services. The company stated that access to the Alice AI assistant, Mail, Maps, Search and Taxi was being restored, but that "other features remain offline." The firm's status page showed partial availability in some areas even as outage indicators persisted; the maintenance team said some customers might access elements such as the Yandex Cloud Console and API, but availability was inconsistent.
Yandex Pay — the company's digital payments service that the source says is comparable to Apple Pay or Google Pay and integrates into online and in-store shopping, installments and bill-splitting — was affected because the Vladimir site supports it. Pirogov reassured users that "when it comes to your money, it's important to us not just to restore Yandex Pay as quickly as possible, but also to ensure that everything is working reliably," and that users' money is safe, even as access remained unavailable.
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End the scrambleOperational response: engineers, status messaging and recommendations
Yandex said its specialists were continuing "restoration work around the clock" and acknowledged that its technical support team was receiving an increased number of requests, which could lengthen response times. The company advised customers to "use alternative sites for hosting and reserving resources," repeating that the Yandex Cloud platform was "still operating in a limited mode."
Pirogov conveyed the tension between speed and reliability: "I understand that you're not waiting for words, but for access to your money. And I understand how hard it is to wait when you can't use it. We can't give you a precise timeline for the restoration yet, but we promise: we won't stop until the service is back online."
What this means for Yandex users, enterprises and technologists
- Yandex users: People relying on Yandex Pay lost access to payment functionality even as the company maintained that funds were secure; other consumers saw disruptions to Mail, Maps, Search, Alice and Taxi during the partial restorations.
- Enterprises and cloud customers: The status page and maintenance updates signaled inconsistent access to Yandex Cloud Console and APIs, and Yandex recommended moving hosting or reserving alternative resources — immediate actions enterprises may take while restorations continue.
- Technologists and operations teams: The strikes underscore a need to validate disaster recovery and multi-site redundancy plans; Yandex's prioritization of high-usage services reflects common triage choices when infrastructure is partially lost.
Political and security context cited by Kyiv and others
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said the drone attacks were a response to Russian strikes that targeted datacenters in Kyiv. The BBC reported that, in September, Russian drone strikes hit a business center in Kyiv, killing four people and damaging a datacenter; that episode reportedly caused around 100,000 households to lose internet access and generated downstream effects such as public transport boards failing to display information in Lutsk.
The Vladimir-site strike on Sunday came hours after U.S. president Donald Trump publicly accused Zelensky of wanting "to make problems for the world" by continuing attacks on Russian oil refineries, and said it was time for Ukraine to elect a new president. Trump also claimed Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an "energy ceasefire" to halt attacks on each other's energy infrastructure; Kyiv said it was unaware of the agreement before Trump announced it on his social media platform but said it would halt attacks on Russian energy infrastructure if Moscow reciprocated. Hours later, Russia launched a missile attack on a Ukrainian power plant.
The strikes on Yandex datacenters have produced an operational scramble and a public communications challenge: engineers are restoring services piece by piece, users face interrupted payment and consumer services, and the linkage between cyber-physical attacks on datacenters and wider political signaling has become explicit in public statements from Kyiv and abroad. For now, Yandex's repeated assurances that users' money is safe sit alongside an inability to give a precise restoration timeline — a tension that will shape short-term choices by users, customers and the company alike.
