Yandex’s commercial director has said the thing advertisers were waiting to hear. After two weeks of data-centre damage, the money didn’t leave. Speaking at the Group4Media conference on 23 October, Gleb Dobrorodnykh said advertiser activity on new campaign launches is back to where it was before the October attacks, and that ad budgets are still growing. Over the weekend Yandex then quietly reopened two more pieces of its ad stack: Yandex Business on 24 October and Yandex Audiences, in read-only mode, on 25 October.
Here is what changed, what is still broken, and why I’d treat the “no churn” line as a statement of intent rather than a data point.
“We were worried about churn. We didn’t see it”
AdPass reported it as the first public appearance by a Yandex top manager since the drone strikes on the company’s data centres. It quotes Dobrorodnykh directly: “We were worried there would be an outflow of clients, but we didn’t see one. The statistics are good; there are even more campaigns than in the same period last year.” He thanked advertisers, partners and agencies for their “calm”, and said the team had worked 24/7 on repairs. He also confirmed that Rekonfa, Yandex’s own ad conference, will take place in spring 2027.
Cossa and Topvisor’s journal carry the same talk. They add that ads kept serving throughout the outage, and that Yandex is pushing performance advertising, omnichannel promotion and its Panorama reach product. Yandex says Panorama can reach up to 120 million unique users in Russia.
The point that matters: the claim is about campaign counts and new-launch activity. It is not about spend per advertiser, click volumes or auction prices, and Yandex published no numbers behind it. A rise in campaigns after an outage is exactly what you’d expect mechanically. As we explain below, Yandex Business is telling advertisers to create new campaigns to get full placement again. Restarting old ones isn’t enough. Some of that “growth” may simply be relaunches.
Yandex Business: back, with a placement catch
According to Topvisor, Yandex Business has restored the main tools for managing organisation listings and promotion. Owners can edit company details again, manage branches, reply to reviews and create offers. Campaigns can be created, extended, relaunched and resumed, and settings, statuses, dates and budgets are visible in the cabinet.
Where your ads can appear now depends on how you start the campaign:
- Extended active campaigns serve on Maps, Search, Yandex Go and the Yandex Advertising Network.
- Resumed, finished or previously created campaigns serve only on Maps and the organisation list in Search.
- To get all available placements, you need to create a new campaign.
Statistics are available but “may be incomplete”. Campaigns that were already running kept going within their limits.
If you manage local listings in Russia, that is the practical takeaway for this week. A paused Business campaign that you simply switch back on is not the campaign it was. Check the placements, not just the status.
Audiences: you can look, but not touch
On 25 October Yandex Audiences reopened in view-only mode. You can open existing segments, but you can’t create or edit them in the interface. Existing segments keep working in campaigns, but their data may update with a delay.
You can still build and refresh segments from CRM data, Metrika, AppMetrica and the pixel through the API, although processing is slower than usual. Geo segments and look-alikes are not available via the API at all for now. For anyone running retargeting or similar-audience prospecting in Direct, this is the real constraint. “Direct is back” and “your targeting is back” are two different statements.
Cloud: 90.47% of data recovered
Below the ad stack, RBC (via www1) reports that Yandex Cloud engineers have restored access to 90.47% of the data held on the platform before the attacks. Part of it has moved to a new site that went live on 23 October. Three facilities were hit: Sasovo after a fire on 8 October, modules in Kaluga on 9 October, and Vladimir on the night of 11 October. Yandex has arranged for Selectel, K2Cloud and VK Cloud to host affected customers’ data, and has waived Yandex Cloud and Yandex 360 fees until the end of October.
Ten per cent of a cloud is not a rounding error. If your client’s site, feeds or analytics pipeline ran on Yandex Cloud, check it rather than assume it’s fine.
And the SEO tools are still last in the queue
None of the weekend’s announcements touched Yandex Webmaster. As we reported on 21 October, Direct came back fully while Webmaster’s recrawl and removal tools stayed read-only. Our latest forum recap found webmasters still waiting days for fresh pages to be indexed. The order of recovery has been the same throughout: ad cabinets, then statistics, then local listings, then audiences, and the organic tooling last.
Dan’s take
I’d read Dobrorodnykh’s comments as reassurance aimed at the market, and they are probably broadly true. Russian advertisers don’t have many places to move a search budget, so a big exodus was never likely. But “more campaigns than a year ago” is not something I’d put in a client deck. There are no figures behind it, and the relaunch mechanics I described above inflate campaign counts on their own.
The useful learning is about priorities. Faced with a three-site outage, Yandex restored revenue first, then data, then the tools that help publishers get indexed. That isn’t a scandal; most platforms would make the same call. It is a reminder that organic visibility on any engine sits downstream of that engine’s commercial plumbing. My advice for this week: rebuild Business campaigns rather than resuming them, audit look-alike-dependent Direct campaigns, and keep logging indexing lag. We’ll keep tracking it in Yandex News.