Powerful attack on Yandex data centers: why taxi and food apps don’t work

The scale of destruction of the IT infrastructure was frightening: the unique Russian supercomputers Chervonenkis, Lyapunov and Galushkin, used for the most complex calculations and support of cloud platforms, were hit. The loss of a huge amount of computing power instantly caused a chain reaction in the Runet ecosystem. Leading cloud platform Yandex Cloud was forced to go into emergency mode due to exhaustion of all available spare capacity.

According to experts, the country was on the verge of a systemic crisis, since it is almost impossible to quickly restore or replace the most complex server equipment in the face of sanctions and a shortage of chips - it will take many months and billions of rubles.

The direct and most painful consequence of air attacks for ordinary citizens was the paralysis of logistics and household services. Across the country and beyond (in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Armenia), popular mobile applications “Yandex Go” and “Yandex Food” actually ceased to function.

In large cities with a million people, calling a taxi turned into an impossible task: because of the disconnection of the professional application “Yandex Pro”, drivers and couriers lost contact with the system and could not take orders, which led to a rise in prices for alternative carriers and chaos in the market. Customers also lost the ability to pay for orders, and many users in the payment system “Yandex Pay” were blocked personal funds.

The echo of a man-made disaster immediately reached a third-party business, whose foundation was firmly tied to the cloud infrastructure of the affected IT giant. Monitoring sites Downdetector and Sboy.rf recorded an avalanche of complaints about failures in the largest retail chains, restaurants and online platforms. Problems with access and processing of orders were covered by the network “Tasty and dot”, the marketplace Lamoda, retailers “Pyaterochka”, “Magnit” and “Lenta”, as well as the popular real estate service “Tsian”. Due to the shutdown of servers, the online ticket purchase system of Russian Railways and the website of St. Petersburg Pulkovo airport were temporarily disrupted.

The situation clearly demonstrated the frightening vulnerability of the modern digital economy, where several successful hits on land-based databases can paralyze the life of a huge country in an instant.

Earlier, "MK in Novosibirsk" reported which sites will be available to Novosibirsk under Internet restrictions.