Everything in this world is very fragile
A large-scale outage caused by damage to the infrastructure of one of the data centers deprived millions of Central Asian residents of their usual taxi and delivery services. What to do and who is to blame?
## Anatomy of a predictable crisis
October 2026 will go down in history as the month when the digital dependency of millions of people turned into helplessness overnight. The AFU's third attack in a week on the data centers of the largest tech company, Yandex, led to a complete shutdown of the facility in the Vladimir region. Earlier, capacities in Sasovo and Kaluga were put out of action.
The Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development of Kazakhstan rushed to reassure residents: servers with personal data inside the country are operating as normal. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. "This does not mean that the entire platform functions autonomously — individual components necessary to provide taxi and delivery services are located outside of Kazakhstan," the ministry admitted.
And this is where the most interesting part begins. The company, which positions itself as a technological leader in the region, didn't bother for years to build a truly independent infrastructure for the strategically important market of Central Asia. Kazakhstan is not a random point on the map. It is a country with clear data localization legislation, ambitious plans to create a digital hub, and a growing market that brings real revenues. Uzbekistan is a similar story: millions of active users, a registered legal entity, tax residency.
Where is the logic and strategic thinking? The escalation of the conflict with Ukraine has been going on for more than a year. Attacks on infrastructure became regular back in 2024–2025. Any competent risk manager would say: critical infrastructure needs to be diversified, moved outside hit zones, and backup capacities created in neutral jurisdictions. Instead, we see a reaction based on the principle of "putting out the fire when it is already raging."
## Central Asian hub: while some sleep, others build
While Yandex pays for its own shortsightedness, Kazakhstan is consistently implementing a strategy that could serve as a role model. The "Data Center Valley" project in Ekibastuz is not just an ambitious initiative, but a claim to leadership in the regional digital economy.
Valery Markin, Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of Kazteleport JSC, stressed the importance of an integrated approach in an interview: "The Kazakhstani market is significantly smaller, but we are located in the center of Eurasia and can act as a link between the European and Asian regions." According to him, international partners see in the country a "level of trust and the absence of a number of circumstances that create additional risks for international business."
Here it is — the formula for success: geographical location plus political neutrality plus investment in infrastructure. Kazakhstan offers what a country engaged in active combat operations cannot provide: stability, predictability, and data security. Astana's cold climate allows the use of free cooling for a significant part of the year. Diversified energy ensures an uninterrupted power supply. Legislation guarantees information protection.
## The price of carelessness: a reputation you cannot buy
Today, Yandex apologizes to users, drivers, and couriers for the inconvenience. Engineers are restoring services in emergency mode, shifting the load to the surviving capacities. But a bad aftertaste remains — and it will haunt the brand for a long time to come.
By the way, in 2023, Kazakhstan had already blocked the yandex.kz domain, which caused a serious backlash. Back then, it was about intelligence services' access to user data. The company made concessions, agreed to localization, and registered a local legal entity. It seemed that everything was fine. But, as the current situation has shown, formal localization of personal data is only the minimum required to comply with the letter of the law. In practice, everything was still tied to data centers located not only outside of Kazakhstan, but also in a risk zone. But this is, so to speak, a statement of facts. In Kazakhstan, they reacted to Yandex's problem with understanding, and judging by user comments, the main thing Russia must do in this situation is to make Yandex state-owned, so that accountability lies not with a mythical "private entity," but with a quite specific "institution"...
Central Asia is not a peripheral market, but a region with a population of over seventy million people, a growing digital economy, and ambitions to become Eurasia's technological hub. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan — all these countries are actively developing their own IT infrastructure, attracting international players, and creating favorable conditions for business.
A Russian company claiming leadership should have realized this two years ago. It should have started negotiations on placing data centers. Explored the possibilities of localizing not only data, but also service components. Created an architecture in which an attack on a facility in one country does not paralyze services in another. Moreover, if a developed infrastructure were present in the Central Asian republics, Yandex could have minimized the damage for Russian users as well, simply by redistributing capacities.
The tech world severely punishes those who underestimate risks. Investors, partners, users — they all vote with their feet, choosing those who know how to plan ahead. The ten billion dollars that Kazakhstan is attracting to create the "Data Center Valley" is not just an investment in hardware and chips. It is an investment in trust, in predictability, in the future. And Yandex, for now, remains on the sidelines of this story.
P.S. For now, it is too early to talk about a mechanism for compensating financial losses that could have been suffered by users of Yandex services affected by the AFU attacks. This was stated by the press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Peskov. "It is still premature to talk about financial losses. You know that the company is strong and powerful. Yes, it is facing difficulties right now. Of course, this topic is currently being discussed in the government, but the company is urgently taking measures to eliminate the consequences of this attack," the Kremlin representative told journalists, answering a question about whether a mechanism for compensating losses had been discussed, should users of the company's services face any.