UAV attacks carried out against Yandex data centers in Russia between October 8 and 11 have caused widespread disruptions affecting digital services in various countries where the company operates. It was reported that three separate data centers were targeted, with two being completely disabled and one partially disabled.
The outages were not limited to users in Russia. Problems were also experienced in Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan regarding taxi applications, digital payment transactions, cloud storage, and map services connected to the Yandex infrastructure.
In Turkey, disruptions in payment processes for taxi drivers using Yandex Go, in particular, came to the fore. Istanbul Taxi Drivers Chamber of Tradesmen President İsmet Dalcı stated in a statement on October 12 that some taxi drivers using the application had been unable to collect their earnings for 2-3 days. Dalcı noted that difficulties were also encountered in determining how much payment should be made to drivers due to problems accessing system records.
DISTRIBUTED INFRASTRUCTURE EXACERBATED THE OUTAGE
The fact that a taxi application operates in Istanbul does not mean that its entire technical infrastructure is located in Turkey. Critical processes such as identity verification, payment records, map services, and driver-passenger matching can be carried out via servers in different countries. Therefore, a failure in one data center can affect users' access to payment, call, or location services in other countries.
Data centers operate as large-scale facilities that provide the storage, processing power, and network connectivity that applications need in the background. Damage to the shared infrastructure in these facilities can lead to service disruptions without the need for thousands of servers to be disabled one by one. Even if backup data centers exist, capacity, synchronization, and ready-to-operate conditions do not always ensure that the outage is completely prevented.
In Kazakhstan, problems lasting approximately 36 hours were reported in Yandex Go services. While taxi hailing and delivery services were disrupted, the government of Kazakhstan announced that personal data was kept on servers within the country, but some critical service components operated abroad.
In Uzbekistan, users were unable to hail taxis, view trip fares, or track the location of buses on October 11. Drivers also experienced issues accessing Yandex Pro. Yandex Uzbekistan managers announced that unresolved transactions regarding payments and driver earnings would be addressed; it was reported that services had gradually recovered as of October 13.
In Kyrgyzstan, errors were reported in food ordering transactions in addition to taxi hailing services. It was stated that Yandex apologized to users, drivers, and couriers.
It was reported that the outages also reflected on some services outside of Yandex. According to Reuters and the Financial Times, technical problems were experienced in Russian Railways, the public bus operator in the Moscow region, and some media organizations in Russia following the initial attacks.
The targeting of the data center in Sasovo also drew attention in terms of Yandex's artificial intelligence capacity. According to information previously disclosed by the company, there were two large supercomputers running on Nvidia A100 processors at this center. However, it has not been clarified whether these systems sustained physical damage.
Following the attacks, claims also emerged that there was a major drop in bot traffic originating from Russia, suggesting that pro-Kremlin disinformation networks had collapsed. However, technical analyses cited by The Verge revealed that the measured decline was primarily due to automated software scanning Yandex's web pages, and that it could not be concluded from this data that propaganda bots were largely disabled.
News Source: 12punto
