Russian tech giant hit as drone attacks knock three data centres offline
The Russian tech giant has scrapped customer fees until the end of October after three drone attacks in four days took half its data centres offline.
Yandex has waived fees for its cloud computing and virtual office suite through the end of October as engineers work to restore services damaged in Ukrainian drone attacks on its data centres. The Russian tech giant confirmed the move on Tuesday, as its stock fell sharply and the Kremlin declined to estimate the financial cost.
"We understand that right now it's important for you to focus on your own tasks, so we're taking on the costs of cloud and collaboration tools ourselves," Yandex B2B Tech said in a statement. Yandex Cloud, a platform with more than 64,000 corporate clients, said subscribers would not be billed for usage between 8 and 31 October. Yandex 360, a software suite providing email, document editing, cloud storage and video conferencing, said fees would be waived for subscribers on personal plans.
The digital wallet application Yandex Pay said it would waive late fees or interest payments incurred during the downtime and raise interest rates on customers' savings accounts to 20% this week. The announcements follow three drone attacks on Yandex data centres in four days, which took three of the company's six data centres offline. Yandex Cloud, 360 and Pay all said they had partially restored operations.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters during a daily briefing on Tuesday that it remained premature to estimate the financial losses from the attacks. "The company is strong and powerful," he said. "Yes, it's currently facing difficulties and of course this issue is being discussed in the government, but the company is urgently taking measures to deal with the aftermath of this attack."
Yandex stock dropped 77 billion rubles ($918.5 million) over two days of trading on the Moscow Exchange, marking a 5.4% fall in market capitalisation.
The strikes form part of Ukraine's deepening campaign against Russian infrastructure, as Kyiv continues to resist Moscow's unprovoked invasion. The World House, which maintains a dedicated page outlining its support for Ukraine at worldhouse.uk/support, continues to document the consequences of Russia's aggression.