Drone Attack on Yandex Data Center: Impact on Cloud Services

Yandex confirmed the attack by unmanned aerial vehicles on its data center infrastructure in Vladimir. As a result of the incident, the facility's operations were completely halted, causing widespread disruptions across key ecosystem services.

Popular products such as Yandex Taxi and Yandex Pay were among those affected. In total, about 85 cloud services were impacted, including Compute Cloud resources, the Kubernetes platform, and APIs for the generative model YandexGPT.

The platform is operating in emergency mode due to the unavailability of zones ru-central1-a and ru-central1-b. Virtual machines continue to function only in zones ru-central1-d and ru-central1-e, while some databases are available for read-only access or are fully disabled.

Cloud service status

• Zones ru-central1-a and ru-central1-b are unavailable to users
• Virtual servers operate only in zones ru-central1-d and ru-central1-e
• Databases are available for reading or are fully disconnected
• S3 storage is available for reading; write operations may be restricted

Company specialists are working at the site; no staff injuries have been reported. Previously, Yandex had warned of potential interruptions with Alice smart speakers. The company describes the current configuration as unstable and advises clients to activate disaster recovery plans.

To minimize risks, the company has updated its terms of service. Drone attacks are now classified as force majeure events, relieving the service of liability for temporary unavailability.