In October, drones hit 3 of Yandex's data centres in 4 days.

Transcript

1. Amazon, Google and Microsoft all build their clouds on the same bet:
2. that their buildings won't fail at the same time.
3. In March, Amazon lost that bet in the United Arab Emirates.
4. Drones struck 2 of its data centres,
5. and Amazon advised customers to move to its other regions.
6. In October, drones hit 3 of Yandex's data centres in 4 days.
7. Yandex runs a search engine, a taxi app, and a cloud.
8. A cloud is computers you rent.
9. Yandex's cloud in Russia sits in 4 of its data centres, called availability zones.
10. If one goes dark, the rest carry on.
11. Amazon's list of what a zone protects against includes power cuts,
12. fires and floods.
13. None of the three companies' zone pages mentions an attack on the buildings.
14. And Microsoft and Google say zones don't cover losing a whole region.
15. For that, they point customers to a second region.
16. On the night of 7 October,
17. drones set fire to Yandex's building in Sasovo, south-east of Moscow.
18. Zone B went dark.
19. Yandex couldn't yet say if the equipment could be saved.
20. The design held: the load moved to the other 3 zones.
21. But Yandex warned that new computing could be limited,
22. and the next morning it named 3 rival clouds for its customers.
23. On 9 October, drones hit another Yandex data centre, in Kaluga.
24. The next day, Yandex began approving extra computing power by hand.
25. At 4 a.m. on 11 October, Moscow time, power was interrupted in Zone A.
26. An hour later, Yandex said drones had shut down its data centre in Vladimir.
27. 2 of 4 zones, in 4 days.
28. Yandex called what was left unstable,
29. and advised customers to restore their systems on external sites.
30. Outside Yandex.
31. Since late September, Russia has been hitting data centres in Ukraine.
32. It says they process intelligence for Ukraine's army.
33. After the first 2 Yandex strikes, Ukraine's president called them a mirror response.
34. The damage didn't stop at the cloud.
35. Yandex's taxi app was disrupted as far away as Kazakhstan and Armenia.
36. And on 10 October,
37. Yandex's user agreement gained a clause that names
38. drone strikes among the events for which neither side is liable.
39. The cloud was built to survive losing one building.
40. It survived one.
41. Amazon, after losing 2, sent customers to its other regions.
42. In Russia, Yandex's cloud has only one region.
43. Its advice was to go outside Yandex.