Yandex services across Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan were disrupted following a series of drone attacks on the company’s data centres in Russia between October 8 and October 11.

Impacts were seen in taxi bookings, delivery platforms and other digital services, according to local reports from media outlets including Azattyq, Kursiv and 24KG. 

Ukraine has stepped up attacks on Russian data centres since Russia lately started hitting Ukrainian facilities of the kind. During the summer, a Ukrainian campaign directed at striking warehousing and logistics facilities of Russian ecommerce giant Wildberries also caused notable impacts across Central Asia, with traders losing substantial stocks of merchandise sent to Russia.

The damage caused to Russian infrastructure run by Yandex, sometimes referred to as “Russia’s Google”, forced several facilities offline. On October 8, a drone attack caused a fire at a Yandex data centre in Sasovo, in western Russia's Ryazan region, according to media reports. A further strike damaged infrastructure at a facility in Kaluga region, also in western Russia,  on October 9. On October 11, an attack damaged a Yandex data centre in Vladimir, located around 180 kilometres (112 miles) from Moscow, prompting a complete suspension of operations there.

“The infrastructure of the Yandex data centre in Vladimir was damaged as a result of a drone attack. Work has been completely suspended. There were no injuries, and emergency services are working at the scene to eliminate the damage,” Yandex Go Qazaqstan said on October 11.

Yandex Uzbekistan told Kursiv on October 12 that most of its services had resumed, while technical problems could persist in some functions.

The outages affected Yandex Go, used to book taxis, and Yandex Pro, which drivers and couriers use to manage trips and orders. In Kazakhstan, some users reported being unable to book rides, with the application displaying a “no ride” message. Users in Almaty and Astana reported problems accessing the service.

“Almaty, what happened to Yandex? I haven't been able to call a taxi for half an hour. Who knows?” Azattyq quoted a user identified as Nettali Sukhanova as saying in a post on Threads on October 11. Another user, Zere1, reportedly asked whether others were experiencing problems, saying Yandex had been working intermittently in Astana.

Yandex’s Kyrgyzstan press service told 24KG that teams were working to restore affected services but did not explicitly attribute the local disruption to the drone attacks. The company explained that its platforms rely on computing resources distributed across servers in different countries. When a failure occurs, workloads can be transferred to other servers, although some functions may become temporarily unavailable in other markets.

Yandex Go Qazaqstan apologised for the disruption, saying specialists were working to restore services as quickly as possible.

In Uzbekistan, the company said payment processing, partner payouts and customer support were among its priorities. Yandex Uzbekistan head Izzat Shukurov said employees were working around the clock to restore operations and acknowledged that the outage had disrupted journeys, orders and the work of drivers and delivery partners.

Neither the Kyrgyz nor Uzbek division provided a deadline for the full restoration of all services.