Why is Yandex Webmaster down?

· Technology

Why is Yandex Webmaster down?

If you've been trying to open Yandex Webmaster for the past few days and keep landing on the same screen, you're not alone. The page says, roughly, that Webmaster lives in Yandex's data centers, the service is temporarily down, and engineers are on it.

Nothing is wrong with your site, your browser or your account. Yandex's own servers were physically damaged.

What happened?

Yandex runs five large data centers in Russia: Vladimir, Sasovo, Ivanteevka, Mytishchi and Kaluga. Three of them were hit by drones within four days:

  • Night of October 7 to 8, Sasovo (Ryazan region): A fire broke out after the strike and the site shut down completely. It holds tens of thousands of servers and two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to build its AI models. Yandex says it doesn't yet know whether the equipment there can be restored.

  • Morning of October 9, Kaluga: A campus designed to be Yandex's largest in Russia. Several modules were knocked out entirely.

  • Night of October 10 to 11, Vladimir: Shut down completely. One of Yandex's most powerful supercomputers is also housed here.

Yandex says none of its employees were hurt. According to news reports, Ukrainian forces carried out the strikes. After the Sasovo attack, President Zelensky said Ukraine was responding to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers.

What's affected?

For a while, almost everything:

  • Yandex Cloud: The platform went into emergency mode. Yandex told customers the remaining infrastructure was unstable and advised them to switch to their own disaster recovery plans. NetBlocks measured Yandex Cloud connectivity at about 30 percent of normal on October 11.

  • Everyday services: Mail, Disk, Pay, Go (taxi), Eats, Music, Kinopoisk, the Alisa voice assistant and smart home products all had problems. Disk downloads were restricted to keep other services running.

  • Other companies built on Yandex: Many services that run on Yandex Cloud went down too, including Dodo Pizza, Magnit, Lamoda and the Pulkovo Airport website.

  • Outside Russia: Taxi and delivery services were disrupted in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

  • Webmaster: The dashboard runs in these data centers, so it's down. Search itself came back on October 11, but side services like Webmaster are still waiting their turn. Yandex says it is restoring the most widely used services first.

Where things stand

Search, Maps, Mail and Alisa started coming back from October 11, though not every feature works. Yandex Pay was partly restored on October 13. Yandex is moving customer data and services to rival cloud providers VK Cloud, Selectel and K2Cloud, and says it won't charge for Yandex Cloud and Yandex 360 through the end of October.

Yandex hasn't said whether any customer data in the damaged sites is permanently lost. Meduza reports that replacing the damaged equipment is expected to take about six months, so some services may take a long time to fully recover.

What should site owners do?

There isn't much to do right now. Webmaster stats, indexing reports and site verification will have to wait. In the meantime, don't remove your DNS verification records or the meta tag on your site; keep them in place so verification still holds when the service returns. If you use Yandex Metrica or Yandex Cloud, expect outages and gaps in your data there as well.

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