Drone attacks on three Yandex data centers in Russia disrupted taxi, delivery, and other digital services in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. At the same time, the company said that Kazakh users’ personal data continued to be stored within Kazakhstan. The outages revealed how heavily Central Asia’s digital economy depends on computing infrastructure beyond its borders.
Between October 8 and 11, drones attacked three Yandex data centers in Russia. The first facility hit was in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, where two supercomputers used for artificial intelligence development were located. The center shut down completely. A subsequent strike hit a data center in Kaluga, disabling some of its equipment. On October 11, another attack forced a facility in Vladimir to shut down.
Yandex confirmed the damage and said no employees were injured. Company specialists began redistributing computing workloads among the remaining operational sites, but it is not yet known when the damaged equipment will be fully restored. According to Reuters, the strikes on Russian data centers were part of an expansion of attacks on economic and technological infrastructure during Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The consequences quickly spread beyond Russia. On October 11, users in Kazakhstan encountered problems ordering taxis, meals, and groceries through Yandex Go, Yandex Eats, and Yandex Lavka. The disruptions also affected scooter rentals and other applications. Drivers and couriers could not receive orders, while restaurants and stores temporarily lost access to some of their customers.
Yandex Qazaqstan confirmed the technical problems. By evening, taxi booking was available again, although some functions continued to operate with restrictions. The company explained that when servers fail, computing tasks are transferred to other resources, but switching workloads takes time.
Similar disruptions occurred in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Users reported errors when booking rides and ordering deliveries, as well as problems displaying fares. In Kyrgyzstan, Yandex’s local division acknowledged the problems and confirmed that damage to infrastructure in one country could disrupt applications in another.
For Central Asia, this is more than a temporary inconvenience. Digital platforms have become part of the urban economy, supporting the work of drivers, couriers, restaurants, stores, and delivery services. When an application stops accepting orders, some market participants effectively lose access to customers. However, reliable estimates of financial losses in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan are not yet available. It is unclear how many orders were lost or whether partners will be compensated for their losses.
The outages also affected Yandex’s financial services. Dmitry Pirogov, head of the company’s fintech division, said on October 11 that users were temporarily unable to check their balances, pay for purchases, or transfer money through Yandex Pay. According to him, account information is stored in multiple copies, and checks found no loss of records. However, data preservation did not ensure uninterrupted access to financial transactions.
This distinction proved particularly important for Kazakhstan.
Following the widespread outages, questions arose about why damage to servers in Russia affected applications in Kazakhstan despite local legal requirements to store personal data within the country.
Yandex Qazaqstan said it complies with Kazakhstan’s data protection and storage requirements. However, storing user data locally does not mean that all computing operations are also performed in Kazakhstan.
Modern digital platforms distribute tasks among servers in different countries. A database containing personal information may be located in Almaty or Karaganda, while algorithms that match passengers with drivers, calculate fares, and assign orders may rely on computing resources abroad. If those resources become unavailable, an application can stop working even when its local database remains completely intact.
Nurbek Sadykov, founder of the cloud company qCloudy, explained to Digital Business that this architecture is common among international platforms. Maintaining a full range of computing equipment in every country is expensive, so companies distribute their infrastructure across multiple sites. Backup servers, however, cannot always immediately take over all the tasks handled by a damaged data center.
Yandex already has its own cloud infrastructure in Kazakhstan. In 2024, the company launched a Yandex Cloud region with equipment in Karaganda. But the existence of a local data center does not mean that every function of Yandex Go and other services runs on its infrastructure or can be fully transferred there during an outage.
This calls into question the simplified notion of digital independence as merely locating servers within national borders. Reliable services require backup computing capacity, independent communications links, data synchronization, and the ability to transfer workloads quickly between facilities.
The problem is not limited to Russian companies. Similar risks arise when using American, Chinese, and other international cloud platforms. But Russia’s war against Ukraine has added the risk of physical destruction of data centers to ordinary technical threats. Backups protect information against loss but do not guarantee service availability if several major computing facilities fail at the same time.
In Kyrgyzstan, the October outages prompted discussion of the taxi and delivery market’s dependence on a single major platform. Member of parliament Dastan Bekeshev drew attention to the vulnerability of workers whose earnings depend on access to a foreign application and proposed developing domestic digital solutions.
However, an application’s domestic origin offers no guarantees in itself. A national service may also depend on foreign servers, payment systems, and communications links. If its infrastructure is organized in a similar way, the consequences of a major outage could be comparable.
For Kazakhstan, the issue has added significance because of large-scale investment in its own computing capacity. The country aims to become a regional center for data processing and artificial intelligence, taking advantage of available electricity and new international communications links. But building data centers and ensuring the resilience of existing digital platforms are different tasks.
The October outages exposed a specific weakness in the existing system: Kazakh users’ data may have remained within the country, but drivers still could not receive orders and passengers could not book taxis. For service continuity, where information was stored proved less important than where computing resources were located and how they were backed up.
The Times of Central Asia previously reported on a project to build a major data center and artificial intelligence infrastructure complex in Ekibastuz, with announced investment exceeding $10 billion. The first phase, with a capacity of 125 MW, is scheduled to launch in 2027. However, it remains unclear how much of the future capacity will be available to digital platforms operating in Kazakhstan or whether it will be used to provide backup infrastructure for critical services.
