Yandex Direct is properly open for business again. On 20 October, Yandex said on its official channel that the key Direct tools were back. Advertisers can create and edit campaigns of any type, launch, stop and archive them, register new accounts, manage representatives, and fully run the shared account: top-ups, overdraft, autopay and weekly budget caps. Every placement is serving again: Search, the Yandex Advertising Network, Product Gallery, dynamic search placements (still in beta), the organisation list, hotels and services galleries, Maps, and both messenger placements, MAX and Telegram.
The fine print says “some restrictions remain”. Nine days after the Vladimir data centre was knocked out, the ad platform is mostly whole. The SEO tools still aren’t.
Money first, then everything else
SEOnews pieced together the order of recovery from Yandex Advertising’s statements:
- 11 October: Direct’s main functions restricted after the drone strike on the Vladimir facility, the third Yandex data centre hit in four days (our report);
- 13 October: Yandex Advertising Network and Adfox partner cabinets back;
- 14 October: Promo Pages statistics and the ProBlogger cabinet;
- 15 October: the Direct cabinet reopens, but only to start or stop existing campaigns and add money (covered here);
- 16 October: Metrika, AppMetrica, Yandex Business and the Direct API;
- 20 October: full campaign management.
Yandex says campaigns that were already running kept serving from 11 to 14 October within their daily and weekly limits, even though nobody could log in to change them. Statistics for that period “may be incomplete”. Yandex insists the data is stored and will appear in reports as it’s processed. For scale, it says the ad system handles 1.2 million requests a second for more than 630,000 Direct advertisers.
Not everything is back. On the same day, the Promo Pages team restored its delayed-conversions report and fixed a bug that stopped some campaigns resuming after a top-up. But editing existing campaigns, and creating or launching new ones, is still unavailable. There’s no date.
Webmaster is still in read-only purgatory
Compare that with Yandex Webmaster. Its 16 October status, which ppc.world’s running status page still listed as current after the Direct update, restored six diagnostic tools. Those are robots.txt analysis, page indexing checks, Sitemap analysis, the structured data validator, IP checks and the XML validator. Five sections remain view-only: reviews and ratings in search, feeds and errors, billing, page recrawl and removal of pages from search. Yandex also warns that crawling is slower than usual, that data may update late, and that report exports may not work.
Metrika is limited in its own way. Behaviour reports, including Webvisor, offline conversion reports and content analytics all have caveats. The window for matching an offline conversion to a visit has been shortened, and Logs API data from 11 October onwards may arrive late.
Our take: the recovery order tells you how Yandex ranks its customers, and it’s reasonable that the business which pays the bills came back first. But for sites that depend on Yandex organic, the tools they most need in a crisis are still read-only: “please recrawl this” and “please remove this”. If you migrated a site, fixed a hacked section or had a legal takedown during the outage, you can’t yet ask Yandex to look again. And the robot is crawling slower anyway, as Cloudflare’s data showed.
What to do now
- Don’t optimise Direct off 11–14 October data. Treat those days as missing until Yandex confirms the backfill. Automated bid strategies trained on that window deserve a sceptical eye.
- Re-check attribution. Forum users have already reported Metrika counting ad visits as organic since the restore. Compare against Direct’s own figures before reporting SEO wins.
- Removals without Webmaster: return 404 or 410, or use noindex, and keep the Sitemap current. Expect it to take longer than usual for those signals to be picked up.
- Keep your own logs. Server logs are the only crawl data you control right now.
One sideline: Postmarketing Daily pointed out that a “Yandex has restored…” headline has run every day for a week, and asked whether constant public updates help or keep the outage in the news. For SEOs, the updates have been useful. We’d still rather see one that says “Webmaster: fully restored”.
More in Yandex News and Yandex SEO.