Over the last weekend, three Yandex facilities in Russia have been struck by Ukrainian drones, with Russian users subsequently reporting outages across Yandex’s services. After the third strike, on a data center east of Moscow in Vladimir, Central Asian users of Yandex’s superapp Yandex Go began reporting outages too.
Yandex is one of Russia’s largest technology companies, with a portfolio that resembles a hybrid of Google and Uber, but for the русский мир, the Russian world. Yandex Search holds an estimated 72 percent of market share in Russia while maintaining an estimated search engine market share in Kazakhstan of just under 30 percent. It is with its superapp, Yandex Go – which combines ride-sharing with food delivery and other services – that Yandex dominates in Central Asia.
In 2017 Uber effectively ceded Central Asia to Yandex, agreeing to merge operations in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, where the two companies had previously competed. Yandex Go expanded to Kyrgyzstan in 2017 and to Uzbekistan in 2018. A 2023 effort to enter the Tajik market was defeated by Dushanbe. In 2023, Yandex bought Uber out of the joint venture, becoming the undisputed ride-sharing and food delivery leader in the Central Asian region.
On October 11, following the strike on Yandex’s Vladimir facility, Yandex customers in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan began reporting trouble booking rides, ordering food and accessing their accounts. The press services of Yandex Qazaqstan, Yandex Kyrgyzstan, and Yandex Uzbekistan all acknowledged technical issues to local media outlets and said they had teams working to restore services.
Although services have reportedly resumed, at least in Kazakhstan, Russian media reports stated that it could take months to restore operations at the affected data centers. And that doesn’t factor in possible future strikes.
Kazakhstan’s Agency for the Protection and Development of Competition reportedly issued a warning to inDrive, an alternative ride-sharing app which operates in the country, after its prices spiked during the Yandex outage. As users shifted from the inoperable Yandex Go app to inDrive, prices went up dramatically. The agency claimed that in some cases the cost of rides tripled.
According to RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service, InDrive founder Arsen Tomsky “attributed the price hike to a sharp increase in demand and a shortage of available vehicles.”
This is just another way in which the Russian war in Ukraine has had knock-on effects in Central Asia. While complicating deliveries of KFC, plov or lagman late at night may not rank as the most critical of issues, this incident does underscore that Central Asia’s digital infrastructure remains closely linked with Russia’s. Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development stressed that the personal data of Kazakh users of Yandex is safe because it is stored on servers in Kazakhstan. But the overarching architecture – the technical bits that connect a person to a driver – is not, and therefore risks posed to Russia’s digital infrastructure will continue to spill over into Central Asia.
Ukraine, for its part, positioned its attacks on Russian data centers as retaliation for Russia’s strikes against Ukrainian data centers. Kyiv also claimed that its attacks targeted centers that provide revenue streams to Moscow. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12 that “everyone noticed” a drop in Russian bot activity on social media after the strikes. The reality of that claim is, as these things tend to be, far more complicated.