Yandex, the Russian internet giant, updated its cloud customers after extensive damage to its data centers in Ukrainian drone strikes. In a blog post the company said it had restored access to more than 97% of customer data, but the remaining 2.84% cannot be restored due to critical damage to equipment. According to Tom's Hardware, at least three Yandex sites have been hit so far.
The company attributed part of the loss to customers not using its backup tools, and said those who did lost no data. It has since changed its policy: every new virtual machine in Yandex Cloud is now created with backup enabled by default.
Yandex is also opening a new availability zone, ru-central1-f, at a new, undisclosed location to improve fault tolerance and disaster resilience. At first it will offer a narrower range of services. The case shows how much cloud data depends on where servers physically sit, which is why keeping an additional backup outside the cloud provider is recommended.