The big Yandex outage thread on SearchEngines.guru, “Один из ДЦ Яндекса испытал на себе плохое зло”, is now past 45 pages. Over the last two days the mood has changed from “is anything working?” to “it’s working, but what is it actually showing me?”. Here is what members have reported since our last Yandex forum recap on 12 October.
Webmaster is back, but stuck in the past
On the morning of 15 October, members started saying Yandex Webmaster had come back. Several confirmed on page 42 (“Да, Вебмастер работает”). One member added straight away that it was “НЕ для всех акков”, meaning not for all accounts. Another member said Yandex was bringing services back in groups of customers to avoid everyone hitting them at once. They gave no source for that. Forum veteran alaev offered a less charitable explanation: accounts had lived in different clouds and were now in different “houses”, and search databases were in a similar state, “a bit in Ryazan, a bit in Vladimir, a bit in Skolkovo”. That is his reading, not anything Yandex has confirmed.
The bigger problem is what Webmaster shows once you’re in. On page 44, alaev says impressions in Webmaster have disappeared since 6 October. Another member called the restored service effectively read-only. A user who posted on Habr and Sostav on 15 October gave more detail:
- the summary page carries a banner saying data is temporarily not being updated (“данные временно не обновляются”);
- query statistics stop on 6 October;
- export isn’t available;
- the API times out.
Their conclusion: “для SEO сейчас живой источник только Search Console”. In other words, Google Search Console is the only live data source for SEO right now.
On page 42, one member posted the Переобход страниц (page recrawl) section. It still showed the “Работаем, чтобы всё работало” holding message. If you were hoping to push your backlog of URLs through the recrawl tool, it isn’t there yet. IndexNow and your sitemap are the only levers you have for now. That matters even more given Cloudflare’s data on how far YandexBot crawling fell.
When I checked on Friday morning, the public webmaster.yandex.ru landing page had returned to normal. The Webmaster blog’s newest post is still the 11 October “temporarily unavailable” notice.
Direct and Business are back; Metrika has a side door
On page 43, several members reported around midday on 15 October that Direct was working again (“директ заработал”, “директ ожил — ура!”). One said the stats looked adequate. Another said the API was badly missed. Yandex Business, which manages business cards on Maps, came back too.
Metrika’s web dashboard is still down. On Friday morning metrika.yandex.ru was still showing “Метрика пока недоступна” (Metrika isn’t available yet). But on page 45 on 16 October, one member said Metrika had been working through the Android app for a second day. Another asked whether the app counts traffic for 8–16 October, and nobody has answered yet. That fits reports that the Metrika API came back on 15 October with the outage days filled in.
Odd signals worth logging
- Fewer clicks, better ROI. One advertiser says their campaign has had about 1,000 fewer clicks since 11 October, yet returns have improved. They wondered whether the missing clicks had been bots all along. That’s one account and it proves nothing, but if you see the same pattern, keep the numbers.
- Fast Maps moderation. One member left a Yandex Maps review for a shop and saw it approved within an hour. They said it normally takes at least a couple of days.
- “What’s the point?” One frustrated reply sums up the SEO side. A read-only Webmaster, plus a bot that “pokes at pages” without visible effect, isn’t much use yet.
Our take
Write down 6 October as the last day of trustworthy Webmaster query data. Anything that looks like an impressions crash after that date is missing data, not lost rankings. Please don’t send clients a Yandex visibility report built on the current Webmaster charts. Until the banner goes away and exports work, use your own logs, a third-party rank tracker and Metrika through the API or app.
We’ll do the next Yandex recap when there’s new signal. Earlier ones are in the Roundup archive.