By The Moscow Times | Created at 2026-10-16 15:35:19 | Updated at 2026-10-16 16:05:58
42 minutes ago
Russian arbitration courts have been forced to postpone hearings and freeze legal filings following widespread system failures caused by Ukrainian drone attacks on Yandex data centers, exiled outlet Vyorstka reported Friday.
The technical disruptions reportedly began on Oct. 8 after a Ukrainian drone attack damaged the first of three Yandex data centers in Russia.
According to Vyorstka, the outages disabled online video hearings, froze official audio recordings and prevented judges from opening or downloading case files submitted by the parties.
Judges were reportedly forced to put cases on hold, declare trial breaks or leave bankruptcy filings frozen.
Court rulings directly cited server failures at Yandex Cloud as the reason for legal proceedings.
“Difficulties operating the ‘Electronic Justice’ software package are observed on Oct. 14 due to a massive failure in the Yandex Cloud main data center,” states one judicial order by a regional court shared by the outlet.
Similar outages were recorded across at least nine Russian regions, Vyorstka reported.
PravoTech, the software provider behind Russia’s arbitration court databases, acknowledged the service degradation in an Oct. 8 post.
On Monday, it said basic search features had been restored, but warned that services were still slow due to the cloud provider’s ongoing issues.
The court system failure reflects a wider wave of digital disruptions across Russia following Ukrainian drone attacks on three of Yandex’s six data centers. Search navigation, online banking, food delivery and major retail chains using Yandex Cloud services were still affected.
Key Yandex services did not appear to be fully restored as of Friday evening, as the Kremlin sought to play down the attacks’ effects.
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