Yandex Confirms 2.84% of Cloud Customer Data Lost After October Strikes

Yandex has put a number on its October losses: 2.84% of Yandex Cloud customer data is gone for good. The company restored the remaining 97.16%, it said on Tuesday, but the lost fraction is unrecoverable.

The Russian technology group attributes the permanent loss to critical damage to equipment and to customers who kept no backups on the platform. The distinction matters. Customers who used Yandex Cloud's own backup tools lost nothing, Russian outlet NGS reported. The lesson appears to have been learned on both sides of the contract. Yandex said it will now enable backups by default, so more data survives any future disruption.

What exactly was hit?

Three Yandex data centers were damaged in Ukrainian drone strikes in early October, disrupting the company's infrastructure and services, mainly Yandex Cloud, Reuters reported. NGS dates the strikes with precision:

• The night of Oct. 8, when drones hit a data center in Sasovo in the Ryazan region and started a fire.
• Oct. 9, when a site in Kaluga was reported attacked.
• The night of Oct. 11, when a data center in the Vladimir region stopped working.

Yandex had earlier said supercomputers in two of the damaged sites were not harmed and were moved elsewhere. Hardware, in this case, fared better than the data it served.

Can Yandex replace the capacity?

Anton Khalikov, director of Yekaterinburg hosting provider NetAngels, told E1.RU that three of Yandex's five data centers were damaged. High-performance hardware on that scale is hard to replace, he said, so Yandex is likely to rent capacity from other providers. That is a telling assessment from a competitor: the constraint is not ambition but supply.

Yandex said its engineers are spreading Yandex Cloud resources across new independent locations in different Russian regions. The company has not said how many customers lost data, and its figures have not been independently verified. A precise percentage of an unverified denominator deserves some caution.

A sector under simultaneous attack

The loss comes as Russian cloud operators deal with physical and cyber attacks at once. Hosting provider Beget is rebuilding its cloud from scratch after a data-wiper attack destroyed customer VPS, S3 and Kubernetes data on Nov. 1-2. Two failure modes, one month, one industry.

Policy has followed events. After the October strikes, Russia began weighing underground data centers, and Vladimir Putin ordered private data-center owners to reserve 10% of capacity for possible government use. Whether concrete and compulsion improve availability remains an open question; default backups at least address the failure that actually destroyed customer data here.

For Yandex Cloud, the immediate commercial question is capacity. Renting from other providers while redistributing workloads across new regions, the company is betting that geography can substitute for hardware it cannot quickly buy.