Yandex says 2.84% of customer data is lost after drone strikes on its Ukraine-linked data centres
The company has since made backups default for all virtual machines and is opening a new availability zone with fewer services at first.
Yandex, the Russian cloud and internet company often likened to Google, says it has restored access to more than 97% of customer data after drone strikes hit its data centres in Ukraine-linked attacks. The remaining 2.84% is unrecoverable because of critical equipment damage, and the company partly attributes that loss to customers who never made backups. Yandex has since switched on backups by default for every virtual machine in Yandex Cloud, a change that matters to any team that relies on a single cloud provider. The firm is also opening a new availability zone, ru-central1-f, at an undisclosed site to improve fault tolerance, though it will offer a narrower set of services there for now. Developers and businesses should keep their own independent backups rather than depend on a provider's safeguards.
Why it matters
For customers of Yandex Cloud, the loss shows that a provider's data centres can be damaged and that data not backed up may be gone for good. Yandex now enables backups by default, which means that customers who relied on the earlier setup have a different starting point, but the company has also said part of the loss came from customers without backups. The new zone at an undisclosed site is meant to spread the risk across locations, though its narrower service range means it does not yet offer the same capabilities as the existing zones. Taken together, the events point to a wider lesson that dependence on one provider's safeguards leaves customers exposed.
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