Drone strikes on Yandex data centres disrupt Kazakh and Uzbek services

Drone attacks on Yandex data centres in Russia between 8 and 11 October disrupted ride-hailing, delivery and e-commerce services in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, Kursiv and Gazeta.uz reported.

The outages illustrated a point the Kazakh digital ministry made in its response: that key computing operations for local users are performed abroad.

Yandex Cloud said in a status message that a drone attack had damaged infrastructure at Yandex's data centre in Vladimir and that the data centre's operation was completely stopped. The message, posted on the Yandex Cloud alerts channel, reported no casualties, called the remaining resource configuration unstable and said the platform was running in emergency mode. It advised customers to use any alternative disaster recovery plans they had. Later updates on the same channel listed compute as available in two of its zones, storage as read-only and some services as unavailable.

Kursiv reported that a drone strike and fire shut down a Yandex data centre in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, on 8 October, that a strike damaged the Kaluga data centre on 9 October, and that the Vladimir facility came under attack overnight into 11 October.

Kazakhstan

On the morning of 11 October the Yandex Go ride-hailing service and the Yandex Eda and Yandex Lavka delivery apps temporarily stopped working in Almaty, Kursiv reported. The Astana Times reported on 12 October that users across the country, especially in Almaty and Astana, struggled to book rides, that services had resumed, and that Yandex was still working to stabilise performance without a firm timeline for full recovery. Arsen Tomsky, founder and chief executive of the rival service inDrive, wrote on Threads that it had seen a "sharp influx of passengers and orders", the Astana Times reported.

Kazakhstan's Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development said servers holding Kazakh users' personal data were operating normally in the country, but stressed that data localisation does not make a platform independent of foreign infrastructure, the Astana Times reported. Kursiv summarised the ministry's position as being that personal data is stored on servers inside Kazakhstan while key computing operations are performed abroad. The ministry said it was working with Yandex and Kazakh infrastructure organisations and coordinating with other taxi and delivery platforms to help them handle higher demand, the Astana Times reported.

Uzbekistan

Gazeta.uz reported that Yandex Go was disrupted in Uzbekistan for several hours on the morning of 11 October, with users unable to see fares or place taxi orders, while Yandex Maps and Navigator worked normally. It said the attack on the Ryazan facility on the night of 8 October had earlier disrupted Uzum Market, which it described as Uzbekistan's largest online marketplace, with service restored on the morning of 10 October.

Yandex Uzbekistan's press service said some services "may currently experience errors or be temporarily unavailable". The company said complex services rely on distributed infrastructure, so a failure in one country can affect functions in another, and that it operates in compliance with Uzbek law, Gazeta.uz reported. The Times of Central Asia noted that the strikes disrupted taxi and delivery services in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Local capacity and the localisation question

Kursiv quoted analysts at Teniz Capital as saying that Yandex has not announced plans to relocate its computing operations to Kazakhstan, but that the disruption has given the regulator grounds to demand that those processes be localised. Kursiv also reported that Kazakhtelecom, the largest telecoms operator, holds a 47 per cent share of the commercial data centre market, that its facilities are about 95 per cent occupied with more than 1,700 server racks and combined capacity of approximately 25 MW, and that it is negotiating with more than 20 major prospective customers.

Those operator figures sit alongside a different tracker's count. DC Market Insights listed 27 operating data centres in Kazakhstan with about 30.7 MW of operating capacity as of 7 October, The Times of Central Asia reported; the two sets of figures come from different sources and may not be directly comparable. The government has said it plans to commission 186 MW of data centres in 2027 and a further 109 MW in the second quarter of 2028.

None of the statements reported so far says whether workloads serving Kazakh or Uzbek users will move as a result of the attacks.