Yandex to waive Yandex Cloud and Yandex 360 fees through the end of October 2026

Yandex will not charge for Yandex Cloud or Yandex 360 through the end of October 2026. All cloud services in all Russian availability zones will be free, and in the office suite the company will pause billing for virtual office tools. The relief applies to all customers, including those not directly affected by the recent outages. The company cites the ongoing recovery work after fires at its data centers as the reason.

What exactly is being waived

The scope of the decision is broad. This is not a discount or credits applied to account balances, but a full zeroing of fees for the period. Nothing in the published terms suggests that customers are divided into affected and unaffected: the relief extends to all users of both products.

• Duration: through the end of October 2026.
• Yandex Cloud: all services in all Russian availability zones are free.
• Yandex 360: billing for virtual office tools is paused.
• Who qualifies: all customers, not only those affected by the outages.
• Reason: infrastructure recovery after fires at data centers.

Why free for everyone

The following is our interpretation, not a company statement. In a cloud, it is almost impossible to sort customers by the size of their damage. An outage at one site cascades into dependent services: some companies lose availability, others see higher latency, and still others have to migrate between zones in a hurry or spin up backup environments. Even if no data is lost, downtime and emergency work cost money. A single rule is easier to administer, and it heads off disputes over who was hurt and by how much.

There is also a reputational calculation. The main currency of the cloud market is trust in fault tolerance. Availability zones are designed precisely for scenarios like a data center fire, and customers are now judging how that architecture performed in practice. A free month does not answer that question, but it lowers the temperature of complaints and buys time for recovery.

What the announcement does not say: it does not disclose how many sites were affected, the scale of the losses, or the timeline for full recovery. It is unclear whether separate SLA compensation is planned on top of the fee waiver, and what will happen to pricing from November. These details will determine whether the measure settles the matter or is merely a pause.

What customers should do

The free period is worth putting to use, not just breathing a sigh of relief.

1. Check your invoices and confirm that billing has actually stopped. If payments are charged automatically, compare them against the terms of the offer.

2. Document downtime, lost orders and the cost of emergency work. You will need this data if you discuss SLA compensation.

3. Audit your architecture. Multi-zone deployment, backups stored outside a single site and regular restore-from-backup testing are the bare minimum, and a data center fire tests them harder than anything else.

4. If you run AI workloads in the cloud, check where your model checkpoints, datasets and vector databases are stored. Losing training artifacts costs more than a day of downtime.

5. Budget for November: once the waiver ends, costs will return, and it is better to know that in advance.

For anyone who built critical services on Yandex Cloud, this episode is a reason to reconsider dependence on a single provider and a single site, regardless of how the recovery ends.