Yandex Go outage boosts rival taxi services in Uzbekistan
On 11 October Yandex Go went down across Uzbekistan — because of damage to a data center in Russia. Rivals such as Uklon and MyTaxi reported a surge in orders.
On the morning of 11 October 2026, the Yandex Go ride-hailing app went down across Uzbekistan. Failures began around 6:00 a.m. and the service was almost entirely out by 7:00 a.m., with complaints peaking around 9:00 a.m. Users could not order taxis, see prices or find nearby cars, while drivers and couriers were left without orders.
The cause was not in Uzbekistan
The failure was not a local Uzbek fault but a spillover from a wider problem in Yandex's infrastructure. A Yandex data center in Vladimir, Russia, was shut down in an emergency after its infrastructure was damaged in a drone strike. Because Yandex runs on shared distributed infrastructure, the Vladimir outage rippled into the apps in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Yandex Go's share of the market
According to Uzbekistan's Tax Committee, in 2024 about 85% of all receipts issued through taxi aggregators in the country came from Yandex Go. That is why an outage at a single service had such a visible effect on city transport.
How rivals benefited
During the outage, rival services reported a sharp rise in orders. According to Eduard Kovtun, Uklon's general manager in Uzbekistan, orders on 11–13 October were two to three times higher than usual. MyTaxi, which operates only in Tashkent and keeps its servers in Uzbekistan, said orders rose roughly fifteenfold and that the number of drivers roughly tripled, about ten percent of them new. These figures are the operators' own and have not been independently verified.
Yandex's response and recovery
The head of Yandex Uzbekistan, Izzat Shukurov, said on 12 October: 'Our teams are working around the clock to restore services and address the consequences of the outage.' The service was restored gradually on 12–13 October. The episode intensified debate about how dependent Uzbekistan's digital services are on foreign infrastructure.
