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Yandex Waives Cloud and Software Fees After Ukrainian Drone Attacks on Data Centers

A man walks past the office of Yandex in Moscow. REUTERS / Anastasia Barashkova

Russian tech giant Yandex has waived fees for its cloud computing and virtual office suite through the end of October as engineers work to restore services damaged in Ukrainian drone attacks on data centers.

“We understand that right now it’s important for you to focus on your own tasks, so we’re taking on the costs of cloud and collaboration tools ourselves,” Yandex B2B Tech said in a statement Tuesday.

Yandex Cloud, a cloud computing platform with more than 64,000 corporate clients, said subscribers will not be billed for usage between Oct. 8-31. 

Yandex 360, a software suite that provides email, document editing, cloud storage and video conferencing, said fees would be waived for subscribers on personal plans.

The digital wallet application Yandex Pay said it would waive late fees or interest payments incurred during the downtime and increase interest rates on customers’ savings accounts to 20% this week.

The announcements follow three drone attacks on Yandex data centers in four days, which took three of the company’s six data centers offline. 

Yandex Cloud, 360 and Pay all said they had partially restored operations.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters during a daily briefing Tuesday that it remained premature to estimate the financial losses from attacks on Yandex data centers.

“The company is strong and powerful. Yes, it’s currently facing difficulties and of course this issue is being discussed in the government, but the company is urgently taking measures to deal with the aftermath of this attack,” he said.

Yandex stock dropped 77 billion rubles ($918.5 million) over two days of trading on the Moscow Exchange, marking a 5.4% fall in market capitalization.

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