Yandex outages and a German court's DSA ruling
Shutdowns · 12.10.2026

Yandex is down — and that's not a metaphor. After Ukrainian strikes on data centers in Vladimir, servers at the Russian internet giant started failing: according to NetBlocks, only about 80% of connections were working, while Yandex Cloud saw just around 30%. And this isn't a one-off incident: on Thursday and Friday there were two more similar waves of outages following attacks on other data centers. Even the supercomputers Yandex uses to train its AI models got caught in the crossfire. Rather fitting, really: AI development and real-life explosions turned out to be directly connected, no metaphors needed.

Meanwhile in Germany, a court dealt with a different kind of blocking — far less dramatic, but just as telling. The state media authority NRW tried to force major internet providers to block Pornhub and YouPorn over inadequate age verification. The appeals court in Münster said: not this time. The reason wasn't fondness for the content, but legal hierarchy — the EU's DSA turned out to outrank Germany's own treaty on protecting minors in media. Nicely done: a national regulator wants a ban, and supranational law says "sort out the procedure first."

Two episodes, two very different scales — but both perfectly illustrate what happens when law and reality diverge: in one place a block arrives via drone, in another it crashes into a European regulation.

Source: https://www.heise.de/news/Montag-Ukrainische-Drohnen-gegen-russisches-Internet-Intels-CPU-Wiederauflage-11483723.html