The Russian technology company Yandex announced that its engineers have successfully restored access to 97.16% of customer data stored on its cloud platform (Yandex Cloud), following damage to the company's data centers resulting from unmanned drone attacks.
In an official statement, the company explained that repair operations aimed to restore data damaged after the attacks that occurred between October 8 and 11. However, Yandex acknowledged the loss of 2.84% of the data, noting that this portion could not be recovered due to severe damage to physical equipment and the unavailability of immediate replacement parts.
Attack Details and Geographic Scope
The attacks targeted several of the company's data centers in different Russian regions, including:
- A data center in the Sasovo area of the Ryazan region.
- Three additional data centers in the Kaluga and Vladimir regions.
These attacks caused widespread disruptions in access to cloud services and the cloud storage platform (Yandex Disk).
Changes in Backup Policies
In a proactive step to enhance data resilience, Yandex announced a fundamental change in service settings; the backup feature will be enabled automatically (Default On) when creating any new Virtual Machines. Previously, this feature required manual activation by the user, which could leave data vulnerable to loss in sudden emergencies. The company confirmed that customers who were using pre-existing backup services did not experience any data loss.
The company is also continuing its strategy of distributing cloud computing resources across independent data centers spread across different geographic regions within Russia, with plans to increase the number of these centers to reduce the risks of relying on centralized locations.
Why Does This News Matter?
This event highlights the growing challenge facing cloud service providers, as the threat is no longer limited to digital cyberattacks but has extended to include kinetic attacks targeting infrastructure.
In practice, this incident proves the importance of "automatic backup" policies in reducing the gap between human error and sudden disasters. It also demonstrates that cloud resilience does not depend solely on software strength, but on the geographic decentralization of physical equipment, which is a critically important technical lesson for digital infrastructure companies in unstable regions.