“I ended up in a situation where I had absolutely no money.
Well, I had the money, but it was inaccessible,” said Irina, a blogger from St Petersburg, who spoke to NBC News after four days without access to her money.
Three taxi drivers in Moscow also spoke to NBC News. They use Yandex’s taxi app to take orders and get paid. Yandex said on October 9 that no employees were hurt and that it was working to restore services.
All three said they could not see how much they were earning or withdraw their earnings during the outage. One driver said the app showed error messages and sometimes sent several cars to the same customer. “Data centres are the iron heart of Yandex,” the company said. “Their operation is critical for services that have become part of people’s everyday lives.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked whether the government was looking at financial help for those affected. Russia has stepped up its own attacks on Ukrainian data centres. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Moscow of trying to “leave Ukrainians without the internet.
He said it was premature to talk about government support because Yandex is “facing difficulties” but is “strong and powerful. He said in a speech last week that Ukraine was returning those strikes by hitting Yandex.
