Beget Hit by Massive Cyberattack, Recovery Timeline Unclear

Russian hosting provider Beget suffered a massive cyberattack overnight on 2 November, disrupting a number of websites in the Russian internet. The company says it cannot yet give a date for full restoration of its services.

Beget has invoked Article 401 of the Russian Civil Code, saying the incident shows signs of force majeure. As a result, it says, it is temporarily unable to meet some of its obligations to customers.

What has been restored so far

According to the company, dedicated servers that customers administer themselves are already back in operation. The top priority is now restoring the NS servers that handle domain names, which Beget estimates will take another four to five hours.

Engineers are also working on the mail system. In parallel, they are recovering virtual hosting and cloud infrastructure data from backups. Because of the sheer volume of data, the company says this will take a "long time".

Why it matters

When NS servers go down, domains stop resolving, so websites hosted with the provider become unreachable even where the underlying data is intact. Businesses and projects relying on Beget for sites and email face an open-ended outage, and the force majeure statement signals that customers should not expect the usual service guarantees to apply for now.

The scale of the damage is still being assessed. «We can't yet name exact timelines for restoring all services. We understand how critical availability is for your projects and are doing everything possible to restore operations as soon as we can,» Beget said.