Technology and Scienceupdated 22m ago3 min read
Yandex Restores More Than 97% of Customer Data After Drone Strikes
“This trend represents a new concern for Big Tech companies”
“managed to salvage around 97.16 percent of customer data”
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Yandex salvaged about 97.16% of customer data after drone strikes on its data centers. About 2.84% of data cannot be recovered due to equipment damage and lack of customer backups.
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Yandex data loss after strikes
Russian cloud provider Yandex said it “restored access to more than 97% of customer data” after drone strikes hit its data centers, while Yandex also said that “the remaining 2.84 percent cannot be recovered due to critical damage to equipment and the absence of backups on the platform by customers.” Yandex reported that three data centers were hit in October, including the Vladimir data center, the Yandex DC Sasovo site that suffered a fire, and the company’s data center in Kaluga.
Yandex said two of its supercomputers at the Sasovo site were not damaged and had been relocated, and Yandex said “engineers continue to distribute Yandex Cloud computing resources across new independent locations in different regions of the Russian Federation.” the drone strikes on Yandex Cloud’s data centers were described as retaliation by Ukraine, and the conflict was described as now in its fifth year after Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Drone and missile strikes inflicted “unprecedented damage on data centers in Eastern Europe and the Middle East this year,” disrupting cloud services for millions of people and permanently deleting some Amazon Web Services customer data.
Backup policy and availability zones
Yandex Cloud said it would enable backup by default to prevent data loss, and Yandex also said “currently, all virtual machines created in Yandex Cloud work with the backup function enabled by default.” Tom's Hardware highlighted that Yandex’s own explanation tied unrecoverable loss to “the lack of customer backups on the platform,” while Yandex said users who used its backup tools “did not lose any data.” Yandex also opened a new ru-central1-f availability zone at a new location, and Tom's Hardware said the servers at ru-central1-f would be “more limited in the range of services they can offer, for now.”
The Register pointed to Yandex’s position that drone attacks on its datacenters caused data loss, and the Register’s headline described the situation as “Russian cloud Yandex says drone attacks on its datacenters caused data loss.” Ars Technica connected the technical fallout to modern life in the cloud, with its live conversation titled “Drone attacks and data centers: New Risks for Big Tech” scheduled for Tuesday, November 17 at 1 pm ET with Joseph Jarnecki.
Underground plans and service impacts
Russia’s Minister of Digital Development, Maxut Shadayev, said Russian companies should move data processing centers underground rather than relocating them abroad. The ministry published recommendations in late October advising that facilities of strategic importance be placed underground, inside rocks or bunkers, with structures reinforced, data backups created, and cooperation with security agencies established. Ukrainian drone aircraft attacked facilities associated with Yandex, VK, Sber, and the Russian Federal Tax Service, and the attacks caused “widespread disruptions” across government services, online banking, taxi services, and parcel delivery services.
The ministry said the cost of building underground data centers is 30–40% higher than ordinary facilities, and it cited iKS-Consulting estimates of 1.2–1.3 billion rubles per 1 megawatt of technological load for the average cost. Yandex moved its three supercomputer devices, Lobonov, Galushkin, and Cherponinkis, to new computing locations after the drone attacks, and Yandex’s press office affirmed that the equipment sustained no damage during the attacks.