A drone attack on a data centre in Russia's Vladimir Region on October 11 knocked out Yandex services far beyond Russian borders — including the taxi and delivery apps that thousands of people in Almaty and Astana rely on daily. For roughly a day, booking a ride in Kazakhstan's two biggest cities became noticeably harder, and the disruption exposed just how dependent urban mobility there is on a single platform.
The problems weren't limited to taxis. Users also reported trouble with Yandex Music, Yandex Pay and Yandex Cloud, and service interruptions rippled out to Belarus and Armenia. Services have since come back online in Kazakhstan, though the company is still stabilising performance and hasn't given a firm date for completing all recovery work.
The immediate knock-on effect was a surge for the competition. inDrive, the ride-hailing service founded by Arsen Tomsky, saw demand spike as stranded passengers switched apps. Tomsky said the resulting supply-demand imbalance prompted the company to slash driver commissions to the bare minimum needed to cover taxes, and to consider tightening its bargaining range to stop fares from spiking. For anyone on the ground that day, it meant longer waits and the usual surge-pricing headaches.
The more interesting question is why an outage in Russia took down apps in Kazakhstan at all. Yandex Go Kazakhstan says local users' personal data is stored on servers inside the country, in line with national law. But data localisation, it turns out, doesn't equal independence: the company's products run on distributed computing infrastructure spread across multiple countries, so a failure in one component abroad can break features elsewhere. Kazakhstan's Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development made the same point publicly — keeping data in-country and keeping platforms running are two separate challenges — and said it was coordinating with Yandex and rival taxi and delivery platforms to improve resilience.
Why should this matter to a traveller? If you're heading to Almaty or Astana, ride-hailing is genuinely the practical way to get around, especially late at night or for trips that buses don't cover well. It's worth having a backup app installed — inDrive is the obvious alternative — rather than discovering mid-trip that one outage has left you waving at passing traffic. The episode is also a reminder that surge pricing and driver shortages can hit fast when everyone reaches for the same workaround at once.
The broader takeaway: the digital plumbing behind everyday city life is more fragile and more interconnected than it looks, and a problem in one place can strand passengers thousands of kilometres away.
