Ukraine Strikes Cause Permanent Data Loss at Russia's Yandex Cloud (united24media.com) 75
Russia's Yandex says 2.84% of customer data has been permanently lost following Ukrainian strikes on data centers in the country. "According to the company, recovery is impossible because of critical damage to equipment and the lack of backup copies on the platform," reports UNITED24 Media. From the report: Yandex clarified that customers who had previously enabled the platform's backup tools did not experience any data loss, as their information remained fully preserved. The incident has prompted the company to revise its approach to data protection and disaster recovery, particularly the default settings for cloud infrastructure. Under the updated policy, automatic backups will be enabled by default whenever customers create new virtual machines on Yandex Cloud. Users will retain the option to disable the feature manually through the management console. In addition to changing its backup policy, Yandex Cloud announced the launch of a new availability zone, designated ru-central1-f. The new availability zone operates from a separate location, improving the resilience and reliability of the services. The report says Ukrainian drones targeted three Yandex data centers in Russia over four days, beginning October 8 with a strike on a facility in the Ryazan region that houses two of the company's three supercomputers. A second attack hit Yandex's largest data center in the Kaluga region on October 9, followed by a third strike on October 11 targeting a facility in the Vladimir region that houses the company's remaining supercomputer.
Not terrible, which is too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
DR scenarios that we rehearse do not (yet?) include drone attacks; at a bare minimum we'd need to physically relocate backup machines, which would also require adding rather large pipes we could dedicate to backup traffic. After that we'd probably need think about redundancy - drones can attack multiple sites at once. And after that, we'd need to think about multiregion setups for resiliency against flying bombs, not just overworked engineers.
That all starts getting expensive very quickly; I doubt Yandex did any of that. So maybe they just got lucky, or maybe they were clever, hard to tell.
Too bad it weren't worse. But drones are cheap and Ukraine is very competent and getting more so, so there's hope for a round II.
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Please certainly have considered this type of scenario in the past, but treated it like an aeroplane crash. Place I worked at previously had two data centres near each other, until the risk of a single natural disaster or plane crash motivated them to out source some infra.
I think in general this was thought about more when people looked after the physical infra more, but when you put it in the cloud you put the risk in the back of your mind, but you shouldn't as you can easily duplicate. Here comes the cos
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Re: Not terrible, which is too bad (Score:3)
Putin would pet Russia fall before he cries "uncle"
The only way to end the war is when Putin himself ceases to be in power, unfortunetly he still retains enough popular support to remain in power without even having to force the issue. (Which he would if he faced mass protests)
Re: Not terrible, which is too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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Russia should really start to think in to protect better their high windows, after all, people do drink lot of vodka...
In the west, people do have more "car accidents" (even if cause by a "accidental" explosive device, like those mafia like to order for some reason!!)
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I hope he finds excess Polonium in his toilet paper.
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The way this ends is probably with a nuclear strike on Kyiv.
I've thought this was a potential nuclear war scenario from day one.
And, after the first nuke flies, we will have more to worry about than data centers.
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At this point, years into humiliation after humiliation after humiliation for Putin, I seriously doubt he has any missiles of capable of actually launching, and question whether he has any nukes that would detonate.
If he had them he'd have used them by now.
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That is the type of dismissal behavior that made Putin think that he could launch a bunch of troops to Kiev and take Ukraine power and that took Hitler to invade URSS... we know exactly how both ended. NEVER underestimate your opponent... you may be right, but if you are wrong, your loses will but huge!
For a nuclear war, we all lose...
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The recent actions against Iran also seem to confirm this stance...
The problem that Putin has vis-a-vis Russia is that he only cares about the European Rus...Moscow and St. Petersburg and a few places in between. Those will go quickly if Putin goes atomic.
Adding to that reticence is the fact that a lot of oligarchs have family and investments in western cities. I think you're going to find that Russia is going to follow a "no first use" doctrine, like the US has. Ukraine is not the existential threat to Rus
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Re: Not terrible, which is too bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Map [b-cdn.net] of agricultural production changes in the nuclear winter following a minor nuclear exchange, posted for no particular reason.
(For a full-scale exchange... [colorado.edu])
Also, for no particular reason, a map of Russia's population distribution [i.redd.it], alongside a reminder of Russia's nuclear missile failure rate, particularly booster failures. And that nuclear warheads have been commonly lost disturbingly often even during peacetime, with at least seven weapons from four incidents lost in flight landing in a way that left them fully intact and easily reparable, just from the US alone. And that Ukraine is rich in nuclear engineers, including still some retirees who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.
There's also this myth that "if you just use a nuclear weapon, you automatically win the war". Nuclear weapons are immensely effective terror weapons, but their effectiveness on the front is a lot weaker than most people think. People on frontlines tend to be in trenches, bunkers, basements, armoured vehicles, etc, and can be surprisingly close to a tactical nuclear blast while still surviving. They're effective against hard points but struggle against a broad, diffuse front (aka, today's front, which is a sparsely populated, deep, amorphous zone, thanks to drones). Amortizing Russia's estimated budget for tactical nuclear weapons comes up with ~$15-25M per weapon (not counting the delivery system), so they're hardly a dime a dozen either.
IF, via terror bombing or threats of terror bombing, you can convince your enemy to surrender, then congratulations, you have won (enjoy your nuclear waste heap and restive population who wants nothing more than to kill you). If they do not, however, their only goal remaining will be to focus 100% on using their extensive nuclear waste supplies rich in plutonium, their extensive long-range strike weapon supplies, and their extensive metallurgical experience, to render your major cities to ash in the same way that you did theirs.
(I also just assume herein that Ukraine doesn't actually have a secret nuclear weapons programme already, which is certainly an assumption).
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I would expect Ukraine to have nuclear weapons at this point. USSR used Ukraine engineers to make many weapons over decades.
Based on how their war is going on, I doubt there are stupid people involved for Ukraine.
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I am so old, I don't care if I am replying to a troll :)
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While it will not level a city, it will certainly wipe out a decent amount of the population.
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My personal best guess would be that Ukraine's unstated policy is to have "sprint capacity", like Japan and South Korea do. That is, to not make weapons or anything that would get them flagged as having a weapons programme, but to have everything needed that, if the word "Go" was given, that they could nuclearize very quickly.
Unlike your typical rogue state that seeks to get nuclear weapons, Ukraine has no need for mass centrifuge facilities or anything like that. They already have plutonium en masse, as t
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Though realistically, because 240Pu (from waste) is worse in a fission bomb than 239Pu - generally no more than ~20kT, and challenging to get more than a few kT - still enough to take out a city centre but not a metro area - you'll generally want a fusion weapon, which means deuterium and tritium supplies. And Ukraine doesn't run CANDUs, so you're not going to get tritium from the coolant. They'd need lithium targets / lithium in the coolant to breed tritium. Separation of tritium and deuterium are a mix of
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Only problem w/ that is that Moscow isn't too far away. It might have been different had Moscow been located at Krasnoyarsk krai, but it's located just some 50 miles from Ukraine. Even short range Ukrainian missiles made w/ no foreign technology could hit Moscow easily. But Ukraine has hit refineries and other targets as far away as Omsk, Tyumen and Yamal, and a lot of rich Muscovites have fled to Siberia - a region where they used to have to be deported during the Stalin era
So no, even Putin wouldn't
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I look forward to the unplanned broadcast of Swan Lake [youtube.com].
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Putin calls Luka with panic in his voice. "You have to give me asylum, they'll be dragging my corpse through the streets of Moscow by morning if you don't!"
Luka replies, "I'm sure I can arrange something. I'll get back to you within the hour."
59 minutes later, Luka calls back. "Relax, Vova. I worked out a compromise. They'll only drag half your body through the streets of Moscow. The other half will be dragged through Kyiv."
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Hopefully, any successor would disown the war stating that it was not his idea, and then make the best agreement he can make w/ the US and Ukraine
Well, communists like a collapsing Russuia (Score:2)
Putin would pet Russia fall before he cries "uncle" Well a Russian collapse is how the communists came to power before. This time he'll make sure communism is done correctly. :-)
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Just the last 3 weeks of 2 years average data retention is 3%. That would destroy a lot of companies. So the "which 3%?" is a big question.
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That all starts getting expensive very quickly; I doubt Yandex did any of that. So maybe they just got lucky, or maybe they were clever, hard to tell.
Sounds like they did, but not all of their customers took advantage of (or wanted to pay for) the backup tools. Using a big cloud provider is similar to leasing a DC. You are just outsourcing the hardware and network infrastructure, and buying into a management/automation platform. You still have to plan for disasters. If you are single region and that region takes an outage (or a bomb), that's on you. If you don't use their backup solution or some other backup that takes large scale disasters into account,
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The per-site problem with drone strikes is no different than any other DR scenario; where it gets ugly is correlation. We tend to assume disast
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I expected this to be worse.
DR scenarios that we rehearse do not (yet?) include drone attacks..
Planes have been falling out of the sky for a lot longer than drones have. Same basic risk and impact to mitigate in DR. Minus the arch enemy factor behind the destruction of course.
Drone attacks (as in multiple), fly with intent. A building being hit by an accidental plane/drone/UAP strike, is a hell of a lot different scenario to plan for than an army of drones targeting a companies (multi-site) facilities.
In the latter scenario, your DR "plan" is sitting somewhere between TARFU and FUBAR. That's Meal
Wait until they attempt restoring from tape (Score:2)
I expected this to be worse.
It will be as soon as they start attempting to restore data from offsite tapes. I swear 25% percent of requestw from our offsite tapes provider end up with an 'unable to retrieve'.
Perhaps it is the 2.84% that Putin wants to be los (Score:4, Interesting)
Russia's Yandex says 2.84% of customer data has been permanently lost
Perhaps it is 'conveniently' the 2.84% that Putin wants to be lost? Sorry Mr Prosecutor, the files you have requested were destroyed in a Ukrainian air raid.
When can we force Putin to end this awful war ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there anything the democrats can do to force an end to it, or will Trump be able to let it continue, either because he hates Zelensky so much or because he has been compromised by Putin ?
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They don't care (Score:3)
So it's perfectly okay to throw them in the meat grinder. There is a small risk of depopulating large parts of the country and then having China or India move in. Russia has been threatening atomic strikes to try and keep that under wraps.
But it's not that big of a problem because China and India both have the same declining birth rates so it's not like they are heavy into ter
Re: They don't care (Score:2)
Yeah but Russian automation is famously "throw more men at the problem", it's not like they have the money to make a good showing in robotics. They have blown it all on losing wars, and oligarchy.
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Also, ever since 2025, when Ukraine decided to start taking the war to Russia and bombing refineries, fuel depots and Wildberry warehouses, the notion that Russia is a superpower has been busted. Just like in 1991, the idea of Saudi Arabia being a major regional power b'cos of what it looks like on a map was disabused, this year, it has been Russia's turn. I am surprised that they are still a permanent member of the UN Security Council, w/ veto powers. I won't claim that Ukraine is a superpower, but Russ
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congrats, I sometimes see an idiot. And asking about Biden? Sorry, you are years out of date. So no fight for US? Guess the US is too busy in the war they started with Iran.
In my experience (I'm old), it will take maybe 40 years to trust the US again. After WW2, it took that long for my family to somewhat trust Germany.
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What war in Iran? All I see there is a blockade of Iran, but w/ other ships passing the straits normally, w/ different IRGC factions occasionally lobbing missiles at Hormuz shipping. Regime supporters keep demanding a resumption of the war, but apparently, the regime is in no position to make that call: only the US or Israel are
So far, they haven't, otherwise what's left of the regime would have collapsed already
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Iran is kicking the yanks asses.
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Earn those 1 million Iranian rials
(current value 52 US cents... [google.com])
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If Putin would be able to recover we are next.
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Indeed. Clearly, the issue is that Russia doesn't allow men to compete in women's sports. Oh, wait, that's actually been standard for Russia since the USSR days!
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This is what the old generation of Democrats would do, absolutely nothing, with a small number trying to actually do things. With the mid-terms, there are enough NEW people coming in to office to hopefully push out the old dinosaurs.
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DSA members in the House went from 2 to . . . 6. Out of 435. Just a tad over 1%. The rest are party members of long standing from one party or the other, and the total number of DSA members is less than the Democratic majority in the House, so the long standing members of the party can easily ignore them.
The Senate went from 0 DSA members to . . . 0 DSA members.
Biden (or, rather, the puppeteers handling him) did nothing for three years, and the same party leadership is still in charge.
You sweet, summer chil
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He's not sending just his men, he also found some Asian meat to add to the grinder: https://www.bbc.com/news/artic... [bbc.com]
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Did Russia Manipulate Mearsheimer? (Score:2)
Hard to feel bad (Score:2)
Except when considering that might have been even worse.
Delenda est Russia.
In god we trust, backups we check (Score:4, Insightful)
Send them offsite daily. Not just to the building next door... outside the nuclear blast radius.
Check them weekly. Even better... restore them onto the DR infrastructure as soon as they've been taken.
I mean... really? Its 2026 and people are still using the 'we had no backups' as an excuse?
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> people are still using the 'we had no backups' as an excuse?
Why pay someone with considerable practical experience when a kid out of an Associate's Program "knows computers"?
Survival of the Fittest, perhaps.
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Not just that - I know that the Kremlin is pretty paranoid about data sovereignty. But they could have had datacenters distributed across their 10 time zones - from Smolensk to Anadyr, instead of concentrating them all in Ryazan and Koluga. Good as Ukraine's ranges are, I suspect they couldn't have gone beyond Novosibirsk
I can get small countries being forced to have their data offshore. Russia is the last country that should worry about such a problem
And (Score:1)
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Russia is already creating data-center in mines (data safety, not much computer power because of the heat)... and for sure, the US is quickly and secretly doing something similar or/and updating the old existent ones left from the cold war (the old cold war URSS "datacenters"/bunkers were all sold as scrap to local mafias and the holes aren't probably in enough conditions for that, old mines should be easier for now)
Like Encyclopædia Dramatica's takedown... (Score:2)
"Nothing of value was lost"
What encoding? (Score:2)
How does Yandex store data? Triplication? Erasure coding? Mirrored to remote data centers? The article describes Yandex's capacity in terms of CPU not storage, which is irrelevant when it comes to data loss.
The default guess is they use triplication on HDDs, entirely within a data center, so this means at least 30% of their disks were destroyed ((30%)^3 = 2.7% of the data had all three copies lost), and there is no backup beyond those three copies in the data center. I asked Bing and Google what sort of enc
Good news and bad news (Score:1)
Bad news: Every KB of your data is missing 29 bytes.