Crossroads Asia | Economy | Central Asia

What the Ukrainian Strikes on Yandex Tell Us About Central Asia’s Digital Infrastructure

Drone strikes on Yandex data centers near Moscow triggered service outages in Central Asia, too.

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........

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