Yandex said Tuesday that it restored access to around 97% of cloud customer data affected by last month’s Ukrainian drone strikes on its data centers, though the remaining 3% has been permanently lost.
In a press release, the tech company attributed the data loss to “critical damage to equipment” and a failure by some cloud customers to maintain external backups on the platform.
Ukrainian drones attacked multiple Yandex data centers between Oct. 8 and Oct. 11, leading to disruptions in ride-hailing apps, car-sharing services, food delivery and online maps, as well as email, banking and streaming platforms. Government agencies and private firms whose products use Yandex infrastructure were also impacted.
Yandex later said it had restored “key features” for users and businesses, but its engineers were still working to bring all of its services back online.
In its latest press release, the company said cloud customers who had enabled automated backup features experienced zero data loss.
To guard against future disruptions, Yandex has updated its platform to enable automatic data backups by default for all new virtual cloud servers.
Engineers are also working to redistribute computing workloads across a broader, more decentralized network of data facilities throughout Russia to reduce reliance on single locations, the company added.
Yandex previously confirmed that its specialized supercomputers located at two of the targeted facilities survived the attacks unharmed and have since been transferred to secure alternative sites.
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