Russia experiences online service outages after attack on Yandex data center

Major online services in Russia experienced disruptions on October 8 after a drone attack on Yandex's data center in Ryazan Oblast. The issues affected real estate platforms, electronic document management, and online ticket sales. Amid reports of infrastructure damage, Yandex shares fell by more than 3% during morning trading.

This was reported by Russian media citing statements from affected companies and stock exchange data.

One of the first to report problems was the Russian real estate service CIAN. Users encountered difficulties opening the website and mobile app.

The company confirmed the failure, attributing it to an incident at an infrastructure partner's facility. Service representatives stated that technical specialists are working to restore full platform functionality.

Outages also affected electronic reporting and document management services. The Russian group of companies Astral, which provides these business services, warned clients about possible errors when working with electronic documents.

The company directly linked the issues to the incident at Yandex's data center, which affected some cloud services.

In particular, disruptions may occur when submitting electronic reports, exchanging documents between enterprises, and processing electronic transport documents.

Astral assured that customer documents and data are preserved even when the system reports an error. Company specialists are working together with Yandex to restore services.

The impact of the data center halt also extended to transportation services in Moscow Oblast. The regional bus operator Mostransavto reported the temporary unavailability of online ticket sales.

The company blamed the suspension of the data center, without naming its operator.

Passengers were offered to pay for travel directly on buses using validators or drivers' mobile terminals.

According to preliminary estimates by the carrier, restoring the online service may take up to 24 hours.

Additionally, users from various regions of Russia began mass reporting issues with other digital platforms.

According to monitoring services Downdetector and Sboy.rf, complaints were filed about the operation of the government services portal Gosuslugi, the Russian Railways website, the Avito marketplace, the VKontakte social network, and other resources.

At the same time, the direct connection of all these failures to the attack on Yandex's data center has not yet been confirmed. Some services may have encountered separate technical issues.

Amid reports of a fire at the data center, Yandex shares also began to decline. According to the Moscow Exchange, on October 8 at 09:06 Moscow time, the company's quotes fell by 3.4% to 3568.5 rubles per share.

This reflects morning trading data, not the final daily change in share price.

As previously reported by "Kurs Ukrainy", on the night of October 8 drones attacked facilities in Russia's Ryazan Oblast. In the town of Sasovo, a fire broke out on the territory of the machine-tool plant Sasta, whose products are used by enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.

Also located on this industrial site is a data center owned by Yandex DC LLC.

Yandex confirmed that as a result of the drone attack, a fire broke out at the data center, damaging part of the infrastructure. The facility's operations were completely halted. According to the company, there were no casualties.

In the Yandex Cloud platform, power supply disruptions in the ru-central1-b availability zone began around 01:31 Moscow time.

Later, the company warned that the incident's consequences could affect other availability zones, including the ability to create new virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and databases.

Clients were advised to migrate computational workloads to other sites if possible. At the same time, Yandex claimed that its core services continue to operate normally.

Thus, the consequences of the attack in Sasovo went beyond the data center itself and affected third-party companies using its cloud infrastructure. The full scale of the disruptions and the timeline for restoring all affected services remain unknown.