Analyst: "Yandex Will Cease To Exist As A Company"
- 13.10.2026, 16:18
If Ukraine blows up even one more data center.
If Ukraine were to destroy another Yandex data center, the company would cease to exist. This was stated Eldar Murtazin, a leading analyst at Mobile Research Group .
“One more data center down, and Yandex will cease to exist as a company; it won’t be able to operate,” he said.
Yandex has only two undamaged large data centers left in Russia: in Mytishchi and Ivanteevka (Moscow Region). There is also an overseas data center in Finland, but it is isolated and serves only the international market.
Currently, the entire massive load from all of Russia and the CIS countries has been shifted to the remaining facility in Mytishchi. It is operating at full capacity, causing users around the world to experience disruptions in “Yandex Go,” “Music,” “Pay,” “Maps,” and the cloud.
Yandex, which has always prided itself on its independence, now finds itself in a situation where its own infrastructure is insufficient to serve its cloud customers (Yandex Cloud). The company is forced to negotiate with direct competitors (VK Cloud, Selectel, and K2Cloud) to temporarily migrate data there and save its corporate clients’ businesses.
If another major facility goes down, the remaining capacity will physically be unable to process terabytes of daily requests, and services could go down completely—and for a long time.
Will Yandex be able to recover?
Not quickly. Experts say that restoring the damaged data centers will take at least six months to several years (as late as 2028). The problem isn’t even money or sanctions, but rather the acute global chip shortage, complex logistics, and long wait times for high-speed memory and accelerators due to the neural network boom.
To protect itself, Yandex has already urgently amended its user agreement (offer), absolving itself of financial liability to customers for outages caused by drone attacks and force majeure events.
The company’s shares on the Moscow Exchange plummeted by more than 7.6% immediately after the first strikes.