In November 2026, Yandex officially acknowledged that a portion of customer data on its Yandex Cloud platform was irreversibly lost as a result of October drone attacks on its data processing centers. Following restoration efforts, engineers succeeded in restoring access to 97.16% of user information. The remaining 2.84% could not be recovered due to critical damage to server hardware and the lack of platform-based backups for those specific clients. This is the company's first public confirmation that infrastructure and data restoration has been completed to the maximum extent possible.
Chronology of the incident and scale of damage
Drone attacks on Yandex infrastructure took place in October 2026. The most serious strike hit a data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, where an explosion and subsequent fire caused by the drone strike damaged part of the infrastructure. Data center operations were halted, power supply issues arose in one of the Yandex Cloud zones, and Yandex Mail was temporarily unavailable. The aftermath of the incident extended beyond the Yandex ecosystem: outages were recorded in the electronic document management system of GK Astral, the dating app Twinby, and several other services. At an early stage, the company could not confirm whether the equipment was repairable and stated that the scale of damage was still being assessed. As examination and restoration work progressed, the picture became clearer: initially, it was reported that about 90% of data had been recovered, a figure that later rose to 97.16%.
The role of backup in data preservation
A key factor determining the final loss size was whether clients had their own backups. Yandex emphasized that all users who had used the backup function on the Yandex Cloud platform prior to the incident preserved their data in full. The irreversible loss of 2.84% of information affected exclusively those clients who did not have backup configurations enabled. Thus, the company effectively confirmed that with a correctly configured backup, even a critical physical failure of a data center does not lead to data loss.
Changes to default platform settings
As a measure to prevent such situations in the future, Yandex decided to change the configuration of its cloud platform. Now, when creating new virtual machines, the backup function will be enabled automatically by default. Previously, backups had to be configured manually, which made them essentially optional. The company explained that the lack of default automatic backup was one of the reasons why some clients were left unprotected at the moment of the incident. The change has taken effect for all new resources created on the platform following the announcement of the setting adjustments.
Compensation measures for affected users
Parallel to technical measures, Yandex implemented a series of compensation steps for clients whose operations were disrupted during the infrastructure restoration period. The company temporarily waived fees for Yandex Cloud and Yandex 360 subscriptions for affected users. At an earlier stage, when access to only about 90% of data was restored, the company also reported that efforts to recover the remaining part were ongoing. The final figure of 97.16% was the result of many days of engineering work transferring data to backup nodes and restoring functional hardware.
Context: vulnerability of cloud infrastructure
The Yandex Cloud incident became one of the most resonant examples of physical impact on cloud infrastructure in Russia in 2026. Attacks on data centers demonstrated that even with geographic distribution of services and platform-level redundancy, the physical destruction or damage of equipment in a specific node can lead to partial data loss if the client has not used their own backup mechanisms. Experts note that changing default settings is a step in the right direction, but the question of the resilience of critical digital infrastructure to physical threats remains open for the entire industry.
