Neues Wiener Tagblatt - Drone hits Russia's Yandex in third reported attack

Users told AFP that several Yandex apps had stopped working, among them the company's ride-sharing and payment apps.

"I can't get anything to work at all," said Yevgeny, a 69-year-old sitting behind the wheel of a Yandex-branded taxi near Moscow.

"I've never seen anything like this before. It hasn't happened in the last five years. Now I don't know what to do," he told AFP.

Yandex, often dubbed "Russia's Google", runs the country's most popular search engine, as well as food-ordering and taxi apps used by tens of millions of people.

The attack, the third reported within a week, could signal the start of a new retaliatory campaign from Ukraine targeting Russia's internet infrastructure -- weeks after Moscow started hitting data centres in Ukraine.

"As a result of a UAV attack, infrastructure at the Yandex data centre in Vladimir was damaged," the company said in a service alert on Telegram. The Vladimir region is east of Moscow.

No one was injured in the attack, Yandex said, adding that emergency services were at the site and the company was evaluating ways to restore operations.

"Operations at the data centre have been completely suspended," it added, advising users to activate disaster-recovery plans as the platform operated in emergency mode.

"The remaining resource configuration is considered unstable," the company said, warning that technical support communications could also be disrupted as teams assessed the damage.

On Friday, Yandex said a drone attack had damaged a data centre in the Kaluga region, putting several modules out of service and causing disruptions to some services.

A night earlier, an attack sparked a fire at a Yandex facility in the Ryazan region, causing major outages that affected transport and e-commerce platforms.

burs/rmb

T.Hubert--NWT