Yandex Webmaster has published its second recovery update since the October data-centre attacks. In a blog post on 29 October, picked up by SEOnews, the team listed another batch of tools that are “back in working mode”. It also said the work is not finished.
What has been restored
According to the 29 October post, these are working again:
- The external API, but only “for functions available in the interface”. If a tool is still broken in the UI, don’t expect the API to get round it.
- Review points (Баллы за отзывы), the incentive scheme behind reviews and ratings in search.
- The Security and violations section. This is the one that tells you whether a site has been flagged for malware, doorway pages or other sanctions.
- The recrawl speed setting, which controls how hard the robot hits your server.
- Metrika counter binding, which links a Metrika counter to a Webmaster site.
Yandex says the team “continues to work on the service and is doing everything possible to restore it in full as quickly as possible”, and sends anyone with tool-specific questions to support.
What isn’t on the list
Compare this with the 16 October status update. At that point the diagnostic tools were up: the robots.txt analyser, page indexing check, sitemap analysis, the structured data validator, the IP check and the XML validator. Reviews and ratings, feeds and errors, billing, page recrawl requests and page removal were view-only. Everything else came with possible data delays, because crawling was slow and report exports might not work.
The 29 October list includes the recrawl speed setting. It does not say recrawl requests or removals are writable again. It says nothing either about adding new sites or submitting new sitemaps. In the comments on Yandex’s own blog, webmasters said both were still stuck when we covered the supercomputer statement on 27 October. Yandex hasn’t said those are back, so I wouldn’t assume they are.
The wider picture
As a reminder, Sasovo caught fire on 8 October, part of the Kaluga infrastructure was damaged on 9 October and Vladimir was hit on 11 October. Direct came back first (our 21 October piece). Disk is at 96% of data restored and Cloud is above 90%. In the Q3 results Yandex withdrew its 2026 guidance. It also told CNews it does not plan to raise capex, because it had already invested ₽115bn in reserve capacity and hardware over nine months. The same report says headcount fell 5% in Q3 to 90.6k, with cuts in support, data labelling, logistics and back office. The core team of about 31k is unchanged.
Update, 2 November
Yandex hasn’t published another Webmaster status post since 29 October. In the comments under it, site owners were still saying on 31 October that new projects weren’t being indexed at all. SEO Akademiya says recrawl requests it submitted through the Webmaster interface on 27 October did join the queue, but the same request sent through the API failed with a 504 error every time until at least 31 October. A vc.ru weekly digest adds that the Site move tool was still read-only on 1 November.
My take
This is progress, and the Security section is the important one. A site owner with a sanctions problem has been effectively blind since 8 October. If you run a Yandex-dependent site, check that section now. If you set recrawl speed limits before the attacks, check those too.
But Webmaster is how sites tell Yandex what to look at, and the parts that let you do that still aren’t confirmed. Our indexing log study on 28 October showed Yandex recrawling old pages while ignoring new ones, and IndexNow returning 200 with no visit following. Until recrawl requests, new sites and new sitemaps are back, read your server logs rather than the dashboard. Measure whether Yandexbot actually fetches your new URLs. Don’t take a successful submission as proof.
I’d also keep an eye on the data-labelling cuts. Yandex hasn’t said whether assessor work for search quality is affected. If it is, that matters more for ranking stability than any one Webmaster tool.