The attack, which Ukrainian press said was ordered by Kyiv, happened in early October and caused a fire and subsequent outage at Yandex’s ru-central1-b availability zone. Subsequent strikes targeted more Yandex datacenters and disrupted more of the company’s cloud and payment services. On Tuesday, Yandex posted an update on its recovery efforts, which it spun as something of a triumph because it restored over 97 percent of customer data.
Of course that also means the company lost 2.84 percent of customer data, which it blamed on “critical hardware damage and a lack of backups on the platform.” It’s unclear if Yandex’s use of the phrase “on the platform” indicates it doesn’t keep backups of its own cloud, if whatever resilience techniques it employs don’t create multiple copies of customer data, or if clients didn’t protect their data. Whatever happened, Yandex has decided to enable backups by default for all VMs customers create in its cloud. That decision will mean customers will consume and pay for more Yandex resources, unless they opt out of the automated backups.
