Second wave of internet outages hits Russia after attack on Yandex data center

“The extent of the damage to the infrastructure is still being assessed. For now, we cannot confirm whether the equipment at the Sasovo data center can be restored,” Yandex said in a statement.

The facility is one of Yandex’s five data centers and houses two of the company’s three supercomputers used to train its AI models.

A second wave of widespread outages has affected Russia’s internet. According to outage-monitoring service Sboy.rf, users reported problems with banks, social media platforms, telecommunications providers, email services, Avito, the Russian Railways website, online retailers, and Rostelecom.

Of more than 70 Yandex cloud services, 38 became unavailable.

Cryptocurrency exchange Rapira said access to its services had been “temporarily disrupted because of a power outage on the cloud provider’s side.” The company referred to Yandex’s page on Downdetector.

Corporate systems at the Higher School of Economics, Wildberries, and Ozon also experienced disruptions. The first wave of outages ended relatively quickly.

The domino effect that caused problems across the Russian internet throughout the day may have been linked to an effort to redistribute server capacity after the fire in Sasovo.

The overall extent of the damage remains unclear. Yandex shares had already fallen by more than 3%, according to Moscow Exchange data.