On the morning of October 11, Yandex's infrastructure began to fail amid large-scale damage. When Yandex Food doesn't load an order, and Yandex Taxi can't find a car, an on-the-go alternative is needed.
'Pervy Tekhnichesky' presents not a recommendation, but a list of what is currently working in parallel with familiar services, with caveats for each item.
Food and grocery delivery
If Yandex Food or Lavka don't open, you can place an order through the Samokat or Ozon fresh apps. They have their own couriers and infrastructure, not connected to Yandex. The downside is that the selection of establishments is usually smaller, and delivery zones vary by city.
For groceries near home, it's easier to open the app of the chain itself — Magnit Dostavka, Perekrestok, VkusVill, or Pyaterochka. Delivery comes from the store's warehouse and does not depend on the aggregator's infrastructure. The downside is that the assortment is limited to what is on the shelves of that particular store.
Taxi and carsharing
Yandex Taxi is the largest aggregator in Russia, but not the only one. Citymobil operates in Moscow and a number of large cities, Taxovichkof — in St. Petersburg and regions, with its own fleet. The downside is that they have fewer cars, and during rush hour, waiting times increase faster than with Yandex.
For carsharing, alternatives are Delimobil and BelkaCar. Important: carsharing has its own apps and servers, so a taxi outage does not always mean a carsharing outage for the same company. The downside is that the fleet and rental completion zones of competitors are smaller.
Maps, navigation, and search
If Yandex Maps and Navigator are unresponsive, 2GIS and Google Maps remain. 2GIS has detailed maps of cities and organizations, but real-time traffic data is weaker. Google Maps works with limitations in Russia, but it handles navigation using saved maps.
Voice assistant and search
If Alisa doesn't respond, GigaChat from Sber comes as a replacement — it runs on its own infrastructure and does not depend on Yandex servers. The downside is that GigaChat is designed for dialogue and text generation, not for smart home control or navigation, like Alisa. For those who are used to talking to a smart speaker and ordering music by voice, there are Salyut from Sber and Marusya from VK.
For search — Mail.ru, Rambler, Google, or Bing. For email, if Yandex Mail is unavailable — Mail.ru and Gmail.
What you need to understand
Outages after attacks usually affect data centers and network infrastructure, not specific services.
Therefore, if one service is down, there is a chance that others on the same infrastructure are also working unstably. Therefore, it is in the users' interest to keep two or three applications for each task.