Yandex has started bringing services back after Sunday’s strike on its Vladimir data centre, and the order tells you who comes first. At 06:50 UK time this morning Yandex’s fintech chief said Yandex Pay was “gradually returning”. Consumer services such as Search, Maps, Taxi and Alice came back on Sunday evening. The tools search marketers rely on are still down: Webmaster, Metrika, Direct, Yandex Business and the Yandex Advertising Network (RSYa) partner interface. Yandex has given no date for any of them.
Yesterday we covered the third data-centre strike and the forum reaction. Since then a few things have changed. The outage is no longer just an inconvenient weekend. For anyone running Russian-market search or ads, it has become an operational problem.
What changed in the last 24 hours
- Yandex confirmed it, on the record, with no timeline. A Yandex Advertising representative told Vedomosti on Monday that since the weekend advertisers have been unable to log into some product interfaces, manage campaigns or see current statistics. Ads keep serving. Recovery dates were not given. Kokoc Group CEO Alexander Shokurov confirmed the same picture from the agency side.
- Five cabinets are dark, not two. By Monday evening Hegai Media listed Metrika, Webmaster, Business, Direct and RSYa as unavailable. Habr put the exposure into numbers using Yandex’s own figures: Metrika on about 9 million sites, Webmaster on about 6 million, 92,000 RSYa placements and more than 600,000 Direct advertisers.
- The Direct API and balance top-ups are down too. According to Ingate, neither the interface nor the API works. You can’t change bids, switch campaigns off, check spend or add money. Campaigns run exactly as they were left on Friday, as long as there is money on the balance. Ingate adds that campaigns can’t be stopped through support either. Klerk reports the Direct cabinet showing a holding page: the cabinet is unavailable “but campaigns are running”.
- Metrika data is in doubt. On Sunday the business notice said Metrika was still collecting data. Ingate now says data started arriving with gaps on 8 October and has not arrived at all since the 11th, with the API returning only sparse, partial numbers. Habr and Hegai are more cautious: collection continues for some users, but nobody can confirm the data is complete. Yandex itself hasn’t said, as a vc.ru guide points out.
- Pay got the apology and the sweetener. In the official Yandex channel, Dmitry Pirogov said transfers and payments are back for some users. Access is opening in stages, and the service is still unstable. Savings-account holders get 20% interest for the week of 11–17 October. Webmasters and advertisers have had no equivalent message.
Meanwhile, on the forums
The SearchEngines.guru thread has passed 300 posts. Most of the newer ones are about Yandex Pay and politics, but a few details matter for SEO. Several webmasters say YandexBot crawl traffic in their logs has dropped to zero, and one says nothing has been indexed “since the strike”. Another says saved copies aren’t showing. One poster saw neuro answers return to the SERP on Monday morning. Others asked the obvious question: will rankings get shaken up once the crawlers come back? One webmaster summed up the mood on Monday night. Yandex had restored its consumer services, he wrote, but had given site owners no estimate for Metrika, RSYa or Webmaster, “not even daily RSYa totals that could be pulled from some logs”.
Treat the crawl claims as anecdotal until Webmaster is back and you can check them. They do match what you’d expect if the crawl and indexing pipeline has lost capacity. A frozen index plus a burst of recrawling on recovery is a classic recipe for ranking turbulence that isn’t really about quality.
Why the order of recovery matters
Putting Pay and consumer apps first is the right call for Yandex’s users. People’s money and taxis matter more than an SEO’s indexing graph. But it shows where professional tools sit. As Ingate puts it, the mass-market services come back first, and the marketers’ working tools “wait their turn”. On 10 October Yandex also added drone attacks to the force-majeure clauses in its user agreements. Don’t expect compensation for spend you couldn’t control.
The Direct position is the one that bothers me most. Advertisers are spending money they can’t see, against bids they can’t change, with no off switch. Ingate makes a useful point here. Spend can’t exceed the balance, and if campaigns stop for more than seven days, automated strategies go back into learning. So, oddly, an empty balance may be less damaging than a forced long pause.
What I’d do today
- Mark 8 October onwards as an incident period in every Yandex report, so nobody reads the drop as a penalty or an update. Ingate gives the same advice.
- Make CRM, call tracking and server logs your record. Any third-party counter will still see visits referred by yandex.ru and ya.ru. As vc.ru explains, you won’t get query data, and some app traffic will show up as direct.
- Check your Yandex Maps listings by hand. With Yandex Business down, you can’t fix a wrong phone number or opening hours.
- Don’t top up blindly once Direct returns. Reconcile spend first, then decide.
My take: I can’t remember a major national search engine’s whole webmaster and ads toolset going dark for this long, and Yandex still hasn’t put a single date on its return. If your Russian-market reporting runs only on Metrika and your paid search only on Direct, this week is the business case for changing that. Follow-ups will be in Yandex News.