Yandex has had a rough fortnight for its servers and a very good month for its chatbot. Three of its data centers were knocked out in the space of four days, yet the company says its AI plans are unchanged and a large update to Alice AI will arrive within weeks.
The announcement came from Dmitry Masyuk, who runs Yandex's business group for search services and AI. He said artificial intelligence remains one of the company's main strategic directions and that Yandex intends to speed up its rollout across consumer products and business services. The coming Alice AI update, he said, should substantially widen what the assistant can do. No details of the new features were given, so for now the promise is mostly a date range and an adjective.
The numbers Yandex wants you to notice
The daily audience of the Alice AI app grew by 14% over the past month, according to Masyuk. That is the company's own figure.
The independent one comes from Mediascope, whose September data put Alice AI first among AI services in Russia. In that month it was used by 59 million people, or 48% of the population aged 12 and over. Across all AI services, combined monthly reach hit 55%, which is more than double the level a year earlier.
There is a caveat in the methodology. The study counted websites and mobile apps, but not chatbots inside messengers and not AI-generated answers in search. So the ranking describes standalone AI products, and a good chunk of everyday AI use is simply outside the frame.
The week the servers went dark
The timing of the announcement is the interesting part. It followed a run of incidents at three Yandex data centers:
- Sasovo, Ryazan region. A fire broke out overnight on 8 October, and the facility was shut down completely.
- Kaluga. On 9 October, several modules failed.
- Near Vladimir. Overnight on 11 October, a data center was damaged and also had to be switched off.
The report describes these events as attacks, though the details it gives are a fire, failed modules and damage, with nothing more on how each one happened.
The effects were broad. Alice, search, maps, taxi, mail and payment services were all disrupted, along with others. Outside companies that run on Yandex infrastructure had problems too, which is the usual reminder that a cloud is just someone else's building.
Recovery, in stages
By 14 October Yandex had restored most of the functions of Alice AI, as well as smart speakers and televisions running YaOS. On 20 October it brought back access to the main capabilities of Direct, its advertising service, and Yandex 360, its productivity suite.
The source does not say whether everything is back to normal, and it does not say how much capacity the three sites represented. What it does show is a recovery that took more than a week for some products, which sits slightly awkwardly beside a message of business as usual.
What to make of it
A company announcing an ambitious product roadmap while its infrastructure is still being rebuilt is either confident or in a hurry. Possibly both. The usage numbers give Yandex a fair argument that demand is not the problem. Whether the hardware can keep up with a bigger Alice AI is a separate question, and the report leaves it unanswered.
For now, the facts are modest. A large update is due in the coming weeks, usage is rising, and three data centers are in various states of repair. The update will show how much of that confidence was earned.