Three consecutive drone attacks on Yandex data centers in Russia have disrupted the operation of more than 80 digital services, including cloud platforms, banking applications and transportation services. The attacks were carried out on October 8, 9 and 11 against sites in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir.
According to data cited by Tom's Hardware from Cloudflare analyses, bot traffic from the Yandex network has fallen to 0.4% of the maximum level reported in the previous two weeks. In the first attack on October 8, traffic decreased to about 57% of the peak value.
Cloud and consumer services were affected
The first strike affected the „Yandex“ data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region. It houses two of the company's supercomputers. The next day, a larger complex in Kaluga was damaged, and on October 11, the site in Vladimir was attacked.
Among the affected services are the voice assistant „Alisa“, the platforms „Yandex.Music“ and „Yandex.Smart Home“, as well as the video conferencing tool „Telemost“. Problems were also reported with Compute Cloud, Object Storage, Managed Kubernetes, PostgreSQL and ClickHouse.
There were also breaches with the YandexGPT API, SpeechKit and Vision OCR interfaces. They are used for application development, artificial intelligence, speech recognition and image processing.
The problems affected not only „Yandex“ services. Users reported outages in banking applications, platforms for ordering transport and retail chains such as Fix Price. Disturbances were also registered with related platforms in Russia and neighboring countries.
NetBlocks confirms new network outage
The global Internet traffic monitoring organization NetBlocks defined the consequences of the attack in Vladimir as the second outage in „Yandex“ networks. “Confirmed: indicators point to a second outage in the networks of the Russian technology giant “Yandex“ after a new Ukrainian drone attack on data centers in Vladimir“, the organization states in a publication.
“Yandex“ is among the largest technology companies in Russia and supports a search engine, cloud infrastructure, data storage services, maps, music and transportation platforms. Therefore, damage to individual data centers also affects external companies that use its infrastructure.
At the moment, full data on the amount of material damage and the terms for restoring all affected services have not been disclosed.
Sources: mezha.ua, tomshardware.com, kyivpost.com