Russian pop star Larisa Dolina has lost unreleased tracks from her upcoming album after drone strikes crippled internet giant Yandex's cloud storage infrastructure.
Russian media reported that the musical files disappeared during severe server interruptions that began when unmanned aircraft targeted Yandex data centres across western Russia.
Dolina's director, Sergei Pudovkin, told Russian news outlets that technical problems had wiped out compositions scheduled for release. He explained that tracks had vanished from Dolina's upcoming record just as her production team was preparing the premiere of a new single titled Wings.
Pudovkin said the team will now be forced to reconstruct the songs from scratch. While several critical components were preserved on local hard drives, they exist only as isolated sound stems, meaning that restoring the finished tracks will require extensive additional studio work.
Lost studio recordings
Dolina is not the only Kremlin supporter in Russian pop music facing losses. The previous day, singer Oleg Gazmanov reported that a significant portion of his unpublished compositions had been stored on Yandex cloud servers and was lost.
Gazmanov described the event as a tragedy, stating that most of his recorded material had perished because all of his files were kept in the Yandex cloud.
Both Dolina and Gazmanov are established figures in Russian pop music who have publicly supported President Vladimir Putin. Yandex, widely known as the Russian counterpart to Google, is the country's leading technology corporation, providing cloud computing and storage to millions of domestic users.
Strikes on Yandex data centres
The technical disruption follows a wave of drone strikes targeting Yandex facilities, according to Ukrainian news agency UNIAN. On October 8, a strike sparked a fire at Yandex's largest data centre in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, forcing the site to halt operations and triggering widespread Yandex Cloud outages.
On the night of October 9, drones struck a Yandex data centre in Kaluga, damaging several modules and taking the site out of service. On the night of October 11, explosions hit a 50 megawatt data centre in the city of Vladimir, damaging an installation designed to house 2,880 server racks.
Politico reported that Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centres are creating serious operational problems for Russia, marking the emergence of a new front in the war.
