Yandex Restricts Yandex 360 Features After Drone Attacks on 3 of Its 5 Data Centers

Yandex has restricted some features of Yandex 360, a cloud suite that includes Mail, Messenger, Disk and other services. The cause is drone strikes on its data centers: in less than a week, three of the company's five data centers came under attack. According to available information, rebuilding the infrastructure may take about six months. Physical attacks on cloud infrastructure directly cut the functionality of a product used by both private customers and businesses.

What is known so far

Public information is scarce. Yandex has confirmed the restrictions in Yandex 360, and the disruptions have affected the company's ecosystem as a whole. The source does not say which features have been disabled, what share of capacity has gone offline, or where the affected sites are located. The recovery estimate should also be read as preliminary: it "may take" that long, and it is not a guaranteed schedule.

Key parameters of the situation:

• Data centers attacked: 3 of 5, or 60% of the company's sites.
• Attack period: less than one week.
• Affected product: Yandex 360, including Mail, Messenger, Disk and other services.
• Estimated recovery time: up to six months.
• Measure taken: restriction of some features.

Why losing three of five sites hurts so much

Cloud services are built on redundancy. Data is replicated, load shifts between sites, and users usually never notice an outage. But the safety margin is typically sized for the loss of one site, two at most. When a majority goes down, the remaining two data centers have to carry the traffic of the entire ecosystem. By site count, that is 40% of the original configuration, while actual capacity depends on the size of each site.

Restricting features is a typical way to preserve basic functionality in this situation. The usual logic is to disable or slow down whatever demands heavy compute and storage (synchronization, search, heavy file operations) while keeping mail and messaging as the priority. This is an inference from other incidents, not a scheme confirmed by Yandex.

The six-month timeline is also easy to explain. Servers, power equipment, cooling systems and network infrastructure cannot be bought in a few days, especially at the scale of an entire data center. Replacing what was physically damaged and bringing a site back into operation takes months. The source does not say whether the situation will affect the company's AI services, and that is worth watching separately.

What companies and users should do

If your work depends on Yandex 360, plan on a horizon of months, not days. Copy critical documents from Disk to local storage or another cloud service. For work correspondence, it helps to agree in advance on an alternative communication channel in case Messenger or Mail runs with interruptions.

Corporate customers should check their contract terms and SLA: what exactly the provider guarantees in a force majeure event and whether compensation is provided. IT leaders will benefit from an audit of single-vendor dependencies. If mail, file storage and communications all sit with one provider, a single outage takes down all three functions at once. Follow Yandex's official announcements: they will show which features return first.