Yandex Cloud data loss: 2.84% of customer data gone after drone strikes

On Tuesday Yandex published an update on the recovery and presented it as a success: more than 97 percent of customer data was restored. The company blamed the missing share on "critical hardware damage and a lack of backups on the platform."

What does "a lack of backups on the platform" mean?

Yandex did not explain. It could mean the cloud does not back up its own storage, that its resilience setup does not keep multiple copies of customer data, or that customers did not protect their own data. The wording leaves all three open.

What changes for Yandex Cloud customers?

Backups are now enabled by default for every VM created in the cloud. That means customers will use, and pay for, more Yandex resources unless they opt out.

Yandex's recovery post also links to a page promoting hybrid cloud for data protection. It names the company's own Stackland product, which brings Yandex's stack into a customer's own premises, as an example. With the war continuing, the hint is hard to miss.

On Wednesday Yandex launched a new availability zone, ru-central1-f, in what it calls "a new location" and did not name. Resource quotas limit what users can get there, and it cannot yet handle traffic to private endpoints. Sanctions from many countries restrict technology sales to Russia, so a shortage of hardware would not be surprising.