Yandex recovers 97.26% of cloud data after October drone strikes

Yandex has recovered 97.26 percent of customer data on its cloud platform after drone strikes hit three of its data centers in October. The rest is gone for good. The Russian cloud and search company confirmed that "the remaining 2.84 percent cannot be recovered due to critical damage to equipment and the absence of backups on the platform by customers."

Reuters first reported the recovery figure. The loss breaks down simply: hardware too damaged to read, and no customer-side backups to fall back on. If a tenant didn't keep a copy, there is nothing left to restore.

Which sites were hit?

Three facilities took damage in the October strikes:

• The Vladimir data center.
• Yandex DC Sasovo, which suffered a fire that took the facility's operations down entirely.
• The Kaluga data center.

The Sasovo site is the one infrastructure watchers flagged hardest. It houses two of Yandex's supercomputers. The company said both machines escaped damage and have since been relocated. That matters: losing production supercomputers mid-conflict would have compounded the outage with a capacity crunch.

What does this change for Yandex Cloud customers?

Two policy shifts, both direct responses to the incident. First, Yandex said it will enable backup by default going forward, closing the gap that made the 2.84 percent unrecoverable. Second, the company is spreading compute across more sites. "Engineers continue to distribute Yandex Cloud computing resources across new independent locations in different regions of the Russian Federation," Yandex said, adding that "the number of locations will continue to increase."

In plain terms: no single strike should again take out a customer's only copy of their data, and no single facility should again carry enough of the platform to force a months-long recovery.

The wider conflict context

Ukraine conducted the drone strikes in retaliation, according to the source reporting. The war, now in its fifth year since Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, has hit data center infrastructure on both sides.

Russian strikes have repeatedly damaged Ukrainian facilities in recent months. The list of affected operators includes:

• Parkovyi Data Center
• MiroHost
• Datagroup
• Vodafone Ukraine
• De Novo
• Cosmonova
• Omega Telecom
• Ukrtelecom

That's eight named operators suffering strike damage in a single country. The pattern cuts both ways: in this conflict, cloud and colocation infrastructure is now a routine target, not collateral damage.

The takeaway

Yandex's 97.26 percent recovery is a strong technical result from badly damaged facilities. The 2.84 percent that survived nowhere else is the real lesson. Default backups and multi-region distribution are the fixes, and they're the same resilience measures any operator — in a conflict zone or not — should already be pricing in.