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Yandex Go taxi and delivery services in Kazakhstan have been disrupted for 36 hours following a drone attack on Russian technology giant Yandex’s data center in Vladimir, leaving users, drivers and couriers unable to access the app.
"Yandex Go services are currently operating with errors or may be temporarily unavailable," the company’s Kazakhstan press service said. "We cannot yet name exact timelines, but we are doing everything possible to bring them back as soon as possible."
The outage shows how Ukraine’s apparent campaign against Yandex data centers in Russia is spilling into neighboring countries that rely on the company’s services, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Belarus and Armenia.
Yandex Go Kazakhstan said personal data of Kazakh users is stored on servers in Kazakhstan, but that its services rely on distributed infrastructure. "Individual technological components may be located on servers in different countries. Therefore, technical problems in one component can affect service availability in several countries," it said.
The company did not directly confirm that the outage was caused by the attack in Russia.
Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development announced Sunday that the servers holding users' personal data were in the country and working normally, but some key components for taxi and delivery services are abroad. It said it was working with Yandex and local providers to restore services.
In Uzbekistan, Yandex said some Yandex Go services were unavailable or working intermittently, without saying whether the problem was linked to the attack.
Services in Kyrgyzstan were working normally, Russian media outlet TASS reported.
Yandex said search, its Alisa voice assistant, maps, mail and taxi services were gradually being restored in Russia, though some functions remain unavailable. The company limited some features of its Disk cloud storage.
"We deliberately limited some functions of Yandex 360, including Disk, to preserve the main thing, the operability of services," Yandex told RBC.
Yandex said it agreed with cloud providers VK Cloud, Selectel and K2Cloud to quickly host clients’ data and services. Its shares fell more than 5% in early trading on the Moscow Exchange on Monday, TASS reported.
Replacing damaged equipment could take about six months, market sources told Kommersant.
"These were very large data centers, and since their construction, a global shortage and rising prices for computing capacity began, especially for AI accelerators. Equipping them promises to be expensive and long," said Sergey Kudryashov of Strategy Partners.
Russia’s Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadaev said his ministry and the Defense Ministry are working on protecting data centers, TASS reported.
Drones struck Yandex data centers in Sasovo in the Ryazan region on Oct. 8, Kaluga on Oct. 9 and Vladimir on Oct. 11, shutting the Vladimir facility completely. Yandex has five data centers, four in Russia and one in Finland that was disconnected because of sanctions.
"Two can play at this game," Andriy Kovalenko, former head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, wrote after the first strike, as the Yandex outage spreads beyond Russia.
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