After a drone attack on Yandex's data center, Runet was hit by a massive outage
On October 8, around 4:00 PM, a massive outage occurred in the Russian segment of the internet. According to monitoring services, the problems affected a large number of popular websites and online services, writes The Moscow Times.
Illustrative photo. Photo: Alena Buival / Vladivostok1.ru
Users reported disruptions in the operation of T-Bank, MTS-Bank, Sovcombank, and Alfa-Bank, Avito, Google, YouTube, and RuTube, online cinemas Ivi and KION, the educational resource Dnevnik.ru, the Russian Railways website, some mobile operators, and websites of major retail chains, including Pyaterochka, Lenta, Magnit, and DNS.
The largest number of outage reports was associated with Avito — over 14 thousand reports accumulated within 24 hours. The most serious problems were observed in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Residents of St. Petersburg left more than 7.6 thousand reports, mainly about problems with the provider Skynet, as well as Avito and T-Bank. In Moscow, over 7 thousand complaints concerned, in particular, the Mango Office cloud service.
Massive disruptions began after a strike by Ukrainian drones on the night of October 8 on a Yandex data center in the city of Sasovo, Ryazan region. A fire broke out at the facility. After this, users began reporting problems with Yandex.Disk, Yandex.Documents, and other company services.
The consequences also affected other systems. In the Moscow region, after the attack, it became impossible to purchase bus tickets online. Mostransavto linked this to the suspension of operations of a data center that provided functionality for online sales services. According to the company's statement, restoring the system could take up to 24 hours.
As reported by RBC, users also experienced problems accessing websites of Russian media. Outages affected RBC, RIA Novosti, Kommersant, Vedomosti, Interfax, and Vesti. Some of these websites were inaccessible even when using a VPN.
Russian Railways stated that some users might experience problems when trying to access the company's website. They attributed this to the operation of external services. However, the company claims that the 'RZD Passazhiram' mobile application was not affected by the outage.