Drone strikes on Russian data centers cause Yandex cloud data loss

Russian internet and cloud provider Yandex confirmed that drone attacks on its data centers resulted in permanent data loss. Ukrainian media reported that Kyiv directed the strikes, which took place in early October.

The initial strike caused a fire and knocked out the provider’s ru-central1-b availability zone. Follow-up attacks hit additional Yandex sites, causing widespread outages across its cloud infrastructure and digital payment systems.

Recovery and Permanent Loss

Yandex recently shared an update detailing its recovery process. The company managed to recover more than 97 percent of its stored customer files. However, the incident resulted in the loss of 2.84 percent of customer data.

The firm attributed the missing data to severe physical damage to hardware and an absence of platform backups. It remains unclear whether the gap stems from Yandex failing to maintain native system copies, a failure in data replication across facilities, or customer neglect in securing their own workloads.

Default Backups and New Limits

In response to the incident, Yandex changed its cloud configuration. The platform will now automatically create backups for every virtual machine deployed by users. This update will raise service bills for customers unless they manually opt out of the automated backup service.

Yandex has also pointed customers toward hybrid setups, including its Stackland product, which lets clients host cloud tools on their own premises. Meanwhile, the operator launched a replacement availability zone called ru-central1-f at an undisclosed site.

The new facility faces clear operational hurdles. Yandex placed strict quotas on customer resource usage in the zone and stated it cannot support traffic to private endpoints yet. Global trade sanctions restrict foreign technology sales to Russia, creating supply bottlenecks for data center hardware.