Digital Dependence

While experts debate how the attacks on Yandex's data centers will affect the internet in Russia, residents of Kazakhstan have been surprised to discover that outages beyond their country's borders can seriously disrupt their daily lives. Three years ago, the servers powering yandex.kz were moved to Kazakhstan. Yet after the attacks on Russian data centers, some people in the republic could not get to the train station on time, others could not deliver goods, some lost their archives, and their «smart homes» stopped being smart. Finally, the «beloved» bots disappeared. What happened, and why outages in Russia affected the lives of Kazakhstanis, in this report by Fergana.

Lack of Competition

After the attack on Yandex's data center in Vladimir, users across Russia began complaining en masse that Yandex Go, Yandex Pay, Yandex Eats and Yandex Pro (where taxi drivers and couriers register) were not working. The large-scale outage also hit users in other countries, with people in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Belarus and Armenia reporting that they could not order a taxi or courier. Attempts to book a ride in the app returned a server error message suggesting users try again in a minute.

In Kazakhstan, Yandex Go dominates the market and is credited with about 90% of the taxi market in major cities. The outage sent a surge of users to its main rival, inDrive.

However, inDrive uses a different pricing model: passengers propose their own fare, and drivers decide whether to accept it. Amid the sudden spike in demand, finding a car became harder. The company said it had cut its commission to the minimum and narrowed the bargaining range between drivers and passengers, but that did not help. Amid the frenzy, the average fare tripled.

In response, the Agency for the Protection and Development of Competition (AZRK) sent the service a written warning. The agency concluded that the sharp rise in fares could infringe on passengers' rights, particularly given the limited choice of taxi services.

«The taxi aggregator market in Kazakhstan is highly concentrated. In such conditions, ensuring the availability of services and preventing unjustified fare increases are of particular importance for protecting consumers' interests,» the AZRK stressed.

The agency's complaints against the aggregator are not entirely clear, however. If passengers want to get somewhere faster, it is logical for them to offer drivers a higher price, which drivers are more likely to accept. Lower-priced requests, accordingly, may go unanswered. It is unclear how inDrive could have quickly changed this mechanism amid a sudden influx of users.

Regional taxi companies, which have all but disappeared under competition from the two major aggregators, could not make up for the shortage of cars. As a result, on October 11, when the outage began, many Kazakhstanis were late for work, meetings and events.

Screenshot from threads.com

Not Just Taxis

Taxi problems, however, were only part of the trouble for Kazakhstan's residents. Director Mukhtar Umarov reported on Threads that after the outage he lost archival materials for his documentary «Khan Kenesary: The Last Battle,» which were stored on Yandex Disk.

The lost materials were intended «to supplement the film's content and allow a deeper analysis of historical events.» The main materials survived, however, as a backup copy remained on a hard drive. «Work on the film continues,» the director assured.

Third-party organizations operate through Yandex's infrastructure, so the problems affected many services and companies. For example, Dodo Pizza stopped accepting delivery, pickup and in-restaurant orders for a time.

A number of Western media outlets and experts noted reports that activity by pro-Russian bots had allegedly dropped after the attacks on Yandex's servers. The claim spread widely on social media on October 11 and 12, accompanied by a chart (later found to be AI-generated). It quickly emerged that the claim was fake. Nevertheless, the drop in bot activity was also noticed in Kazakhstan. «Yes, we noticed it too. As soon as Yandex's data centers went down, the bots practically vanished even from our channel,» the popular Kazakh Telegram channel Za Nami Uzhe Vyekhali («They're Already Coming for Us») wrote. There is no reliable data linking the Yandex outages to bot activity, but such observations cannot be ignored either.

Where the Data Is Stored

The Yandex outage has once again raised the question of Kazakhstan's digital sovereignty. As early as 2023, local authorities reported that the Russian company had moved the servers needed to run yandex.kz to the republic, as required by law.

Commenting on the current situation, the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development said that Yandex's servers storing Kazakh users' personal data are indeed located in the country and continue to operate normally.

At the same time, the ministry acknowledged that certain components needed for the taxi and delivery services are hosted outside Kazakhstan.

That means in Russia, as recent events have shown, which sits somewhat uneasily with the country's push for digital sovereignty. Kurultai deputy Lyazzat Zhylkybayeva of the Adilet party drew attention to this and appealed to the Prosecutor General's Office and the Ministry of Digital Development. She asked them to establish whether Kazakhstanis' personal data had been transferred abroad and whether data protection requirements had been met.

«The fact that a service that processes citizens' phone numbers, addresses, travel routes and payment data every day can stop working because of a single failure abroad requires an open and clear explanation of exactly which country, and under which legal regime, this data is processed in,» the deputy's inquiry says.

An Opportunity for Kazakhstan

In the long term, damage to a data center could limit Yandex's ability to develop products, Russian experts believe. Some even question the future of the Runet if attacks on the company's servers continue. Additional risks stem from the geographic concentration of Russian infrastructure and from local laws requiring companies to store information inside the country. If Ukrainian drone attacks on data centers continue, Russian authorities may have to reconsider their approach to these restrictions.

In that case, Russian businesses could look more actively for backup capacity abroad, while Kazakhstan could gain additional opportunities to develop its data center market. It is hard not to recall the republic's mega-project, the «Data Center Valley» in Ekibastuz.

All the more so because such talks are already under way. A government working group on AI development is discussing placing Russian AI data centers in «friendly» countries, in particular Belarus and Kazakhstan, sources in the IT industry told RBC. Russia's Ministry of Digital Development confirmed that various options for locating computing capacity are being considered, but no specific decisions on countries or sites have been made yet.