Yandex has moved another step along its recovery list, and this time advertisers get something too. As of Wednesday evening, advertisers can top up their Yandex Direct balance again. They can’t do it in the Direct interface. They have to go through a personal manager or Yandex support. PromoPages statistics are back, and so are geo-media ads in Maps, Urban Ads, digital outdoor and ProBlogger. The Direct cabinet itself is still locked. The tools SEO teams use every day are still in two different states of broken. Metrika is quietly backfilling data while its interface stays dark, and Webmaster is still showing a holding page.
On Tuesday we reported that Yandex Pay came back before Webmaster, Metrika and Direct. Since then, the RSYa partner cabinet and Adfox have returned for publishers (Kommersant, 13 October). The second wave of fixes landed on 14 October. Here is where things stand on Thursday morning.
What Yandex Advertising restored on 14 October
The Yandex Advertising press office gave the details to AdIndex and RB.ru:
- Direct balance top-ups are available “in manual mode” through a personal manager or support. Campaign settings have been preserved. Yandex says access to the cabinets themselves is planned “in the coming days”, which is the closest thing to a date it has given so far.
- PromoPages is showing read-through, external click and “interested user” data again. Conversions from Metrika are still missing, and Yandex admits PromoPages traffic is “slightly lower than usual”.
- Maps geo-media (banners, pins, billboards, route recommendations) is fully working. Digital outdoor can be booked through a manager with an agreed media plan, even while Direct is unavailable.
- Urban Ads and ProBlogger are back with limits. ProBlogger shows no more than seven days of statistics and recent figures are delayed.
Practitioners have filled in the gaps. Svetlana Vyrodova writes on vc.ru that some advertisers had been paying into Direct “at their own risk” through balance.yandex.ru over the previous days, and only knew the money had arrived because impressions kept going. Refunds out of the cabinets still don’t work.
Metrika: the cabinet is dark, but the data is coming back
This is the part SEO teams most need to understand. At 08:20 BST on Thursday, metrika.yandex.ru was still showing its “Metrika has a home too — a Yandex data centre” page, and the cabinet was unavailable. Behind that page, data is being processed. The agency behind the ProSEO for Business Telegram channel pulled every client counter through the Metrika API on 14 October and compared each day with the same weekday over the previous three weeks. It found:
- 11–12 October fully counted, but showing 11–32% more visits than normal. That could be double-counting during the reload or real growth. They haven’t checked yet.
- 13 October at roughly 27% of normal volume so far. 14 October at about 1%.
- Their own independent counters on the same sites showed normal traffic. Users were visiting. Metrika is just running days behind.
That is a single agency’s sample, not a Yandex statement. It does match what a staged, queue-based recovery would look like. If your weekly report pulls Metrika through the API, it will currently show a spike on 11–12 October and then a cliff. Neither is real yet. Don’t send that chart to a client.
Webmaster and the Search API: no change
Yandex Webmaster still shows its “temporarily unavailable” page, and Yandex has given no timeline. That means no indexing reports, no recrawl requests and no Alice visibility metric. Topvisor is still steering rank tracking towards its live-SERP collector because the official APIs are unavailable. Advertising and payments obviously came first, and Webmaster earns Yandex nothing directly. That’s understandable. It also means organic is the channel with the least visibility into what the outage did to it.
The wider recovery
- AI Studio is mostly back. Yandex told Vedomosti that several corporate AI services had been restored. iXBT lists YandexGPT and Alice AI APIs, Realtime, Retrieval and Embeddings APIs as working again. Workflows, Batch Inference and Dedicated Models are still down. Anyone running content or classification pipelines on YandexGPT can switch them back on, but should keep batch jobs elsewhere for now.
- Systems are moving to other providers. According to iXBT, citing Kommersant, Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadaev said the ministry helped Yandex find reserve sites for key systems. Yandex won’t say where they are.
- Cloud is still free for October. Yandex has repeated that October bills will only cover usage up to 7 October, and has warned about phishing emails posing as Cloud “urgent migration” notices.
What to do now
Advertisers: if a campaign must change, ask your manager to top it up or pause it now rather than waiting for the cabinet. Keep a written record of every request. Publishers: the RSYa and Adfox data you exported earlier this week is your baseline. SEO teams: treat 8 October through to whenever Webmaster returns as one incident window, and give Metrika at least a few days before you trust any day from 11 October onwards. Our earlier coverage of the Vladimir strike and the forum recap on YandexBot going quiet explains why that window starts on the 8th.
Opinion: “top up through your manager” is a stopgap that Yandex is presenting as a feature. It mostly helps large accounts that have a manager. The long tail of small advertisers, who make up most of Direct by count, still can’t see or touch their campaigns a week in. Restoring Metrika data before the Metrika interface is the right engineering call, because the data is the irreplaceable part. But Yandex should say so publicly. Right now a third-party agency’s Telegram channel is the best explanation of why Metrika numbers look wrong. Yandex ought to be telling people that itself.