‘Alice is still chugging along, though she’s showing clear signs of a personality breakdown’: Meduza readers describe how attacks on Yandex data centers are changing their work and daily lives

After repeated Russian attacks on data centers in Ukraine, Ukrainian forces began striking Yandex’s data centers. From October 8 to 11, Ukrainian drones reached three of the company’s data centers: in Sasovo in the Ryazan region, Kaluga, and Vladimir. A major outage followed, affecting Yandex’s services and companies that used Yandex Cloud storage. Millions of people in Russia and other countries felt the effects: Many couldn’t use taxi services or maps, for example, and lost access to their cloud files and money in Yandex Pay. It took until October 13 for Yandex Pay to be partially restored. Meduza asked readers how disruptions to Yandex products and other businesses connected to the company had affected their daily lives and work. We received hundreds of letters and are publishing the most interesting ones.

Warning: This article contains statements that some readers may find offensive. Meduza’s Russian-language newsroom checked all letters for AI-generated content, but even the most thorough screening can’t rule out manipulation entirely. Please keep that in mind.

Natasha

Moscow

On Sunday [October 11], everything looked okay at first when I ordered a taxi, but then all I could see on the screen were two messages: “Searching for a car” and “Loading trip details.” It stayed that way for half an hour. When I gave up and headed for the subway, the driver called and asked where to pick me up. Apparently, he’d noticed my location marker moving away.

I asked for the car’s license plate number, found the car, and we got where we were going. Then I discovered that the payment method had switched from card to cash, and I didn’t have any cash on me. I couldn’t switch it back because the app was still showing the same “Searching for a car” and “Loading details” messages. Restarting it didn’t help.

I said, “Can I send you a bank transfer?” The driver said, “To Yandex Bank.” I opened the banking app, and there was a message saying, “We’ll have everything fixed soon”… It turned out the driver’s other accounts were blocked. Luckily, I managed to reach some friends nearby who had cash. And that ride still isn’t in my trip history.

During those 30 minutes [while I was waiting for the car], I tried downloading other taxi apps from Google Play, but they all seemed to go down at once. Maybe because they’re somehow connected to Yandex too. I didn’t risk ordering a taxi by phone — the local taxi companies have really bad reviews.

That evening, some friends booked a cargo van with almost no trouble. It’s still in their trip history, but they can’t download the receipt, and I don’t think they were charged.

On Monday, Yandex Maps wasn’t showing me bus schedules or the buses themselves. Everything was working properly for my friend, but I was either getting nothing or getting wrong information that didn’t match hers.

Ivan

Yekaterinburg

I can’t access my photo and video archive on Yandex Disk. My whole life is in there — from when I was young to photos of my kids. Right now, you can’t download anything, only view it. And some files look like they’re gone for good — they won’t even open in preview mode.

I’ve already bought myself a NAS. I’d wanted one for a long time but kept putting it off, and now I’m paying for it. I hope I can save the data. I used to have a backup on Google Drive, but paying for it now is a whole ordeal.

Now it all depends on how well Yandex designed its recovery system [for restoring files after an outage — Meduza]. I’d like to believe they’ve taken all the necessary steps on their end.

Either way, Putin and his gang bear all the responsibility.

Stanislav

Nizhny Novgorod

I couldn’t make a payment on my credit card from another bank because all my money is in a Yandex savings account. I had to borrow from people I know to avoid getting hit with interest. It’s not like you can explain to the other bank why you can’t pay.

Hundreds, probably even thousands, of people are in the same situation. Many can’t make their mortgage or loan payments or pay their rent. All of this will damage their credit histories and cause financial problems, because if you don’t meet your credit card’s terms, you can get hit with outrageous interest.

I’m definitely moving half my money to another bank, even if the terms aren’t as good.

Kirill

Novosibirsk

I’m a taxi driver. It’s my main source of income. My work has come to a standstill.

Passengers say they spend 30 minutes trying to order a car without any luck. We drivers aren’t getting notifications about ride requests, and when we do, the location is wrong. Nobody knows how long this will last.

There are no alternatives. Yandex has taken over the entire market. I have nothing fit to print to say about what’s going on.

Hi, I’m Vladislav Gorin.

I’m the host of Meduza’s daily Russian-language news podcast. This summer, the Russian authorities opened a criminal case against me — not for committing a crime, but for telling the truth about Russia and its war against Ukraine.

Because the Kremlin has branded me a criminal, I can’t go home. I also can’t safely travel to countries like Turkey — even though it’s a NATO member — because I could be arrested and extradited to Russia. I can’t even renew my passport at the consulate anymore.

None of this is going to stop me. I know there are hundreds of thousands of people in Russia who don’t want this war and who still believe in freedom and democracy, and they deserve access to independent journalism. Please support Meduza so I can keep reaching them.

Alex

Balakovo, Saratov region

Taxi drivers are waiting at bus stops, store registers are glitching, Kinopoisk isn’t working, and neither is Alice. I wanted to download my data from cloud storage, but no luck.

I’ll buy an 18-terabyte drive and keep all my files on it. I used to think Google Drive and iCloud were a bit expensive, but now I understand what you’re paying for. I’m going to stop using Yandex services. Our whole family has been planning to quit them for a long time anyway. Ukraine was the final nail in the coffin for Yandex. I’m sick of all this, especially all those “majors” from the security services prying into our private lives.

Dodging responsibility whenever something beyond your control happens is a way of life in Russia. It’s cheap and underhanded, though predictable. Our family, like the rest of the world, stopped recognizing Russia’s government as legitimate long ago, so whatever they come up with over there [in the Kremlin] is their business alone. There have never been so many spectacular idiots in the State Duma — the concentration of insanity is off the charts. When is Ukraine finally going to start hitting their dachas on Rublyovka?!

Anonymous reader

Italy

Edvibe, the service for teachers and tutors known in Russia as ProgressMe, isn’t working, even though they present themselves as an international platform. I’ve always paid for it in dollars and had no idea it was connected to Yandex.

Now lessons have been disrupted, and the materials are unavailable. I feel completely drained and have no idea what to do next. Part of what my students were paying for was a convenient platform that was pleasant to use during and after lessons.

There are no alternatives to Edvibe — everything else on the market is awful, with lag and terrible design. Edvibe isn’t perfect, but it’s still a decent option.

I don’t want any connection to Yandex or to Russia at all.

Rustam

Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Yandex dominates a lot of areas in Uzbekistan — it’s the biggest delivery service, taxi service, and so on. At one point, it either drove all the local competitors out of the market or bought them up. It scorched the earth and left nothing alive behind it. So when it went down completely, everything went down. Today [October 12], everything started working again, but badly. Basically, it’s become clear that Uzbekistan depends far too much on Yandex. If anything else happens to it, everything will grind to a halt again.

I used WB Taxi today, but it’s awkward to use. You have to admit that Yandex knows how to make user-friendly products people want to use.

Well, what else are they going to do but say they’re not responsible for events beyond their control? At least everyone knows now: If something happens again tomorrow, Yandex will wash its hands of it.

Marat

We’re a small IT company whose services ran largely on Yandex servers. After the first attack [October 8], some of our services stopped working for our clients. We got everything back up on Saturday [October 10], but overnight into Sunday, they went down again after an attack on another data center. We can see that many of our major clients’ corporate services were also hosted on Yandex’s cloud — so for now, they’ve got bigger things to worry about than taking us to task.

Yandex hasn’t just disclaimed responsibility — it’s still charging for hosting that it’s effectively no longer providing. Yandex has always had the highest prices on the hosting market, but it’s practically the only provider that meets all the requirements of major clients. Now nobody cares about that anymore — they just want the system to work. I think other data centers will soon raise their prices sharply. They’d be foolish not to.

Vasily

Lisbon, Portugal

I’m the founder of a service that advises parents of children under 3. For example, we give advice on children’s sleep and nutrition. Our Russian servers are in the Vladimir region. On the night of the [third] attack, we had to rush to restore data from backups and move it to another platform. We managed to do it.

Now we’ll use Timeweb Cloud and several other backup providers in case Timeweb gets hit. We won’t use Yandex Cloud again, even if they restore something there. It’s not clear yet what we can use instead of Yandex Direct for advertising, but I think we’ll find new advertising channels.

Putin’s regime bears all the responsibility. Yandex shouldn’t have to take responsibility for the consequences of decisions made by a deranged former KGB man surrounded by criminal oil wheeler-dealers from a St. Petersburg back alley.

Dmitry

Tallinn, Estonia

After the strike on the data center in Vladimir [October 11], the Yandex Metrica web analytics system stopped working. It’s not critical, of course, but it’s extremely inconvenient, because its competitor, Google Analytics, reports website traffic with a delay of up to 48 hours. The problems with Yandex Metrica made it impossible to assess website traffic in the hour or two after publication, which in turn made it harder to manage traffic.

I’ve actually been using both analytics services for a long time, but now I’ll have to rely solely on Google Analytics for a while. I’m not happy with it at all, because of the delay, its bad interface, and how poorly it works on smartphones. And the Google Analytics app is a useless mess that tells you nothing.

Yevgeny

Tomsk

I’m a developer at Yandex. After the strike on Sasovo [October 8], everyone was working at a fairly calm pace because we regularly held drills where a randomly selected data center was taken offline. There were some problems, but the staff on call dealt with them quickly.

After the strike on Vladimir, things descended into chaos because our internal messaging app and all our monitoring systems went down. That meant the automated systems didn’t kick in and the right on-call staff weren’t notified. There was no internal communication at all. Developers are working around the clock, trying to stabilize services and free up hardware in the last surviving data center in Kaluga. Technically, there are more data centers, but in practice, all of Yandex’s services run on three — in Kaluga, Sasovo, and Vladimir.

So far, nobody has any idea what will happen next. There are rumors that Yandex is considering moving some of the infrastructure to outside providers’ data centers.

Even though I work at Yandex, I try not to use its products. I only use Yandex Eats, Taxi, and Maps, and I don’t plan to switch to alternatives for now — because there aren’t any.

Yaroslav

St. Petersburg

I work as a courier for Yandex Delivery. On October 11, no orders came in from the middle of the night until 3 p.m. I completed a few [existing] orders, but the money still hasn’t been credited to my balance, and it probably won’t be. Paying couriers will be the last thing Yandex gets around to — if it does at all, of course.

The first thing Yandex restored after the outage was the system that makes couriers lose priority points for turning down orders. That way, couriers couldn’t avoid penalties for skipping [unprofitable] orders and would have to take orders with pickup locations 20 to 30 minutes away. We don’t get paid separately for that travel time.

Unfortunately, there are no good alternatives to Yandex Delivery.

Alina

Korolyov, Moscow region

I work in support for Yandex couriers. In the first few days, we got a huge number of inquiries, mostly about the app: Various functions weren’t working, orders and the bonuses for them weren’t being credited, the map wasn’t working, and they couldn’t start their shifts.

I found out about the third attack [October 11 in Vladimir] before the news came out. At 4 a.m., all our work tools suddenly died, and our work email and corporate messaging app went blank. No way to reach management or colleagues. They restored the messaging app by morning, but it was impossible to work — people just sat through their shifts with nothing to do.

Some of our work tools have now been restored, and everything more or less works. The couriers we support still have lots of problems with the app and instant payouts. Some had tax deducted twice; they were promised their payouts would be recalculated later. We’re trying to help and apologize. I think Yandex Delivery lost a huge amount of money because of disrupted orders.

I rarely use Yandex services myself.

Anonymous reader

Moscow

I work at an IT company, and some of our infrastructure was hosted in those very data centers destroyed by drones. Getting jolted awake by a phone call in the early hours, connecting remotely, and restoring everything from backups at another data center while the business is rapidly losing money is, of course, inconvenient. We were prepared for something like this, but a disaster is still a disaster.

Fortunately, Yandex is not the only cloud provider in the country, but other providers’ data centers are under threat too. Add the equipment shortage caused by the AI boom, along with exorbitant prices and long delivery times because of sanctions imposed over the war. The outlook is so bleak it could give you an anxiety disorder.

Yandex may be a company full of fucking assholes, as everyone knows, but responsibility for the drone attacks lies with a well-known group of people who seized power in Russia and are systematically making life in our country worse.

Inna

Moscow

I flew out of Russia this weekend. My dog stayed in Moscow, where my sister is getting her ready to move. Since she’s an older dog, we’re getting the tests she needs done, and now she’s also been prescribed physical therapy three times a week.

Last week, I submitted a request through the Sobaka-Gulyaka pet-care service. A pet sitter was due to come today [October 12] to take my little girl to an appointment with a rehabilitation specialist, but this morning I received this message from the service:

My sister and I tried to find a pet sitter in our neighborhood on Avito, but it’s obvious that the people there have no experience.

Oleg

Odintsovo, Moscow region

After a walk in the park, my wife and I rented a couple of Yandex scooters. Almost immediately, she said hers was broken. I checked — the wheels were locked. I opened the app, selected the first scooter, and only then did the rental start, even though it should have started right away. A few seconds later, without us doing anything else, the second scooter beeped to life too. We checked the brakes and headed home.

Twenty seconds into the ride, the motor on my clunker cut out. That happens when the GPS glitches. I fiddled with the throttle. Nothing. My speed dropped to four kilometers an hour [about 2.5 mph]. I pushed off with my foot and tried the throttle again, with no luck. I let go of the throttle and took my hands off the brakes, then turned to see how my wife was doing as I got ready to stop. But just then, the satellite connection came back — and the scooter suddenly accelerated on its own. I panicked, didn’t brake in time, lost control, and crashed into a roadside barrier.

I ended up with ripped jeans, a scraped leg, and badly bruised ribs.

There are other inconveniences too. For example, taxi receipts aren’t being generated, so I couldn’t finish the expense paperwork for my business trip. Support is useless in every case. Almost none of my Smart Home devices work. The app is a blank page asking me to add my first device. All four Alice devices suggest the same thing. But the switches sometimes work, including as part of complex automation routines.

Whoosh barely operates in my area. Rebuilding a Smart Home setup with dozens of devices is too much.

Artur

London, U.K.

I’ve been researching my genealogy and building a family tree for almost a year. I’ve put hundreds of hours and quite a bit of money into it. I kept most of the information I’d found on the Genotek website. After the first two attacks, I decided I should back up that data. But by the morning of October 11, the site was already down.

I don’t know whether all my work has survived or when I’ll be able to access it. The company still hasn’t made any official statements.

I haven’t been hit nearly as hard as many people, but I still can’t believe that the work I put in during all those sleepless nights could be wiped out so easily. If I can regain access, I’ll move all the data to a foreign website.

Businesses can’t and shouldn’t be held responsible for drone attacks. The government bears full responsibility to both businesses and their customers. Still, Yandex is an accomplice of the regime, so I have no sympathy for it.

Anonymous reader

Smolensk

I use Yandex Delivery to order stock for my business from Moscow to Smolensk. On October 9, after my latest order, I noticed that my supplier’s delivery times had increased. Goods used to arrive in the usual two or three days, but now delivery is scheduled for October 20. I don’t know whether this is directly connected to the strikes on the data centers or just a coincidence, but the result is obvious: The service has gotten noticeably worse. We’ll try switching to CDEK.

At home, Alice and the Smart Home app stopped working. Even simple commands like “Set a timer for ten minutes” are a struggle for her. We’re back to turning the lights on and off by hand. Sorry for sounding like a snob, but you get used to the convenience pretty quickly.

Personally, I feel bad for Yandex — they have good services. But looking at the bigger picture, I understand that war is war, and [for the enemy] anything goes. After the attacks on Wildberries and Ozon warehouses, this was to be expected.

Sofia

Vladivostok

I’m homeschooled through an online school. As I understand it, they used Yandex Cloud to store course materials, because after the Ukrainian attack, we lost access to lecture recordings, homework, and lots of other things. Drone attacks affecting my education were the last thing I expected, especially since I’m so far from the front.

Teachers are holding classes on MTS Link — not the most convenient platform. The school administration won’t let them use anything better, like Zoom or Telegram.

Yandex, like Ozon and Wildberries, has a monopoly. They know people will be angry for a couple of weeks and then come back, because there are no alternatives with comparable quality and convenience.

Kristina

Da Nang, Vietnam

I’m taking a course through Yandex Practicum. I haven’t been able to study since Thursday [October 8] because the coding practice tools aren’t working. And the students further along than me can’t access the training databases, so they can’t submit their projects.

Practicum has pretty strict rules, with deadlines and expulsions, so this [the current outages] is a real problem. The course coordinators aren’t saying anything except that “the team is looking into it.”

I don’t know of any alternatives that match Practicum’s quality. So there’s nothing to do but wait and worry. All Yandex services treat their customers terribly, but for some reason I had faith in Practicum.

Yelizaveta

Chicago, U.S.

The Ozon app isn’t working [the marketplace used Yandex Cloud to store data — Meduza]. With a VPN, without one — nothing works at all. I can’t buy groceries and medicine for my mom and have them delivered. I’m her only source of money. I’m terribly worried.

Wildberries doesn’t work from the States: Ozon accepts my American card, but Wildberries doesn’t.

Sofya

Moscow

I’m a teacher. All my tests for students are on the Online Test Pad platform. Because of the .com domain, I was sure it was a foreign site, but it turned out to be a Russian project. Its servers are in a Yandex data center.

Now the site is down. Colleagues who contacted [Online Test Pad’s] tech support got this reply: “…there is a very high likelihood that all materials from the past 2.5 years will be lost.” Unfortunately, I don’t have copies of those tests — I wrote everything directly on the site. Creating that many new original tests would take me about a month of daily work. Some teachers have lost even more materials.

Now I’ll look for a new platform for making tests.

Dmitry

St. Petersburg

Yandex NeuroLawyer went down at work. Too bad — it was a fairly useful service. It could check documents for errors, didn’t make up court rulings, and helped me with wording a couple of times…

Alice is still chugging along, though she’s showing clear signs that her personality is disintegrating.

I probably won’t switch to alternatives. If this happened to the biggest domestic provider, what can you expect from the smaller guys? And I don’t really need to anyway. If it comes to it, we’ll go back to searching through court ruling databases by hand, the old-fashioned way…

Nikita

St. Petersburg

Just my luck — this is exactly when I needed to set up business email for my small company. Yandex 360 is the easiest way to do it. But for several days now, the service has barely let me do anything. The project is stuck. I can either wait or use VK WorkSpace, which is worse.

I also use Yandex Disk a lot. Right now, you can’t play audio files there at all — you can only view images. Uploading files to the drive works on and off. It seems to have gotten better now, but as recently as yesterday [October 11], I had to wait a couple of hours just to log into my account. Ironically, I had to use Telegram, which is blocked, to store and transfer files. It still works perfectly with a VPN.

Then there are the little things everyone’s already talking about: You can’t order from Yandex Lavka, you can’t get a taxi, and the maps aren’t showing public transit or traffic.

Switching from one Russian service to another won’t make any difference to data security, so ease of use makes Yandex my first choice. Within Russia, its services are the most convenient for most tasks. And sometimes they’re the only ones.

Whenever I have the chance to use foreign services, I take it. Gmail has been my main email for years. I can’t even imagine using Yandex search instead of Google. Most foreign services you can still access are usually more pleasant to use than Yandex products.

But it’s no surprise that Yandex has become part of every Russian’s daily life. Everyone noticed when it went down. If Ukrainian forces wanted to once again disrupt the comfortable lives of Russians who are indifferent to the war, they succeeded.