Selectel

Yandex Black October: How Architectural Flaws and Capacity Mismanagement Turned Data Center Losses Into a 11-Day Fintech Coma

In October 2026 three Yandex data centers in Central Russia were physically destroyed within days, triggering the collapse of Yandex Cloud and multiple core services. Between the first and third site failures engineers had 74 hours to restore quorum and rebalance workloads yet failed to do so because Control Plane components remained tied to the lost zone and spare capacity had been eliminated to cut costs. Core banking and BNPL systems entered Read-Only mode after losing quorum, forcing a complete stop-the-world reconciliation that lasted until 22 October. Backups stored inside the same regional S3 buckets proved unusable, resulting in a seven-day RPO and primary-key collisions after restoration. The incident exposed that Metro-Cluster designs had been incorrectly treated as full Disaster Recovery and that aggressive AP microservice patterns created logical split-brain conditions outside the database layer.

Yandex Cloud Cascade Failure October 2026 Exposes Multi-AZ Limits and Capacity Exhaustion Risks

In October 2026, Yandex Cloud suffered a prolonged cascade outage across multiple data centers in Sасово, Калуга, and Владимир, triggered by power failures and a drone-related fire that fully disabled the ru-central1-b zone. The incident revealed that standard Multi-AZ designs reach physical capacity exhaustion when multiple zones fail simultaneously, leaving insufficient resources in remaining zones for automatic failover. Businesses relying on managed Kubernetes, databases, and SaaS platforms such as Salebot and CIAN experienced extended recovery times, with backups becoming inaccessible and RTO stretching beyond 24 hours due to index rebuilds and manual quota allocation. Yandex Cloud responded by manually distributing quotas, partnering with Selectel, K2Cloud, and VK Cloud for emergency capacity, and advising clients to activate external disaster recovery plans. The outage also highlighted single points of failure in DDoS protection configurations and Control Plane dependencies that prevented timely migration of master nodes. Architectural recommendations include deploying independent edge webhook buffers using FastAPI on separate VDS instances to preserve incoming events during primary backend failures. Overall, the events underscore the necessity of true multi-cloud strategies that avoid reliance on any single provider's IAM, billing, and physical infrastructure.

Metascan Confirms Limited Data Breach After Two-Minute Telegram Bot Compromise

Metascan has publicly acknowledged a data breach involving internal materials obtained through a compromised Telegram bot token. The attacker gained access to a corporate Telegram chat for approximately two minutes on September 5 and exported a small set of documents before being removed. The incident stemmed from an overlooked bot token on test virtual machines after an employee departure. Among the leaked items were two pilot project reports from July 2026 that mentioned major Russian organizations including Transneft, Selectel, Lenta, Sberbank, and Rostelecom. Metascan attributed the leak to a former employee now working with a competitor and rejected claims of deliberately hidden vulnerabilities. The company has accepted full responsibility, outlined corrective measures, and launched a bug bounty program.

Selectel Launches Local AI Admin Agent aish in SELECTOS to Eliminate Cloud Data Risks

Selectel has introduced aish, a generative AI agent embedded directly into its SELECTOS server operating system. The solution allows system administrators to analyze incidents, review logs, and perform routine operations entirely on-premises without transmitting sensitive data to external cloud providers. Aish operates with a human-in-the-loop model, generating proposed commands and explanations that must be approved by an operator before execution. The primary goal is to support organizations bound by strict data-protection policies, including compliance with Russian Federal Law 152-FZ, by keeping all context within local infrastructure. SELECTOS is based on Debian and is distributed in ISO, QCOW2, and container formats for both cloud and dedicated servers. According to Kirill Dmitriev, Director of System Software at Selectel, the agent is intended to lower the entry barrier for Linux system administration while respecting restrictions on the use of foreign large language models.

Selectel Revenue Exceeds 10 Billion Rubles as Cloud Services Drive Growth Amid Rising Costs

Selectel reported revenue of 10.2 billion rubles for the first half of 2026, marking a 14 percent increase compared with the same period a year earlier. Cloud infrastructure services remained the primary growth engine, contributing 8.9 billion rubles or 87 percent of total revenue. The customer base expanded by 14,400 clients over twelve months to reach 44,500, with smaller customers fueling much of the increase through new VDS configurations. Professional services showed the fastest consumption growth at 1.4 times, while financial and IT sectors raised infrastructure spending by 1.3 times. Adjusted EBITDA rose only 3 percent to 5.4 billion rubles, lowering its margin from 59 percent to 53 percent, and net profit stayed nearly flat at 1.9 billion rubles with margin declining from 21 percent to 18 percent. Operating expenses jumped 23 percent to 4.7 billion rubles, driven mainly by payroll costs that accounted for 65 percent of the total. The company invested 6.4 billion rubles in development, including 4.4 billion rubles on server equipment, a 1.8-fold increase, while expanding GPU purchases for AI workloads despite higher component prices, resulting in negative free cash flow of 3.4 billion rubles and a net debt to EBITDA ratio of 2.1.