Yandex Metrica shows zero, but visitors are still there: what broke

On the night of 8 October, drones hit the Yandex data center in Sasovo and Yandex Mail went down for several hours. A day later the Kaluga site was hit, and zone ru-central1-b of Yandex Cloud stayed unavailable for days. On the night of 11 October it was Vladimir: according to Yandex Cloud, the data center stopped completely and the platform switched to emergency mode.

Yandex runs five data centers, and three were knocked out in less than a week. The company gives no recovery date. Users report errors and blank pages in Yandex Metrica and Yandex Webmaster.

We compared Yandex Metrica for qio.me with our server logs. The last visit Metrica recorded was around 1 a.m. on 11 October, right when Yandex Cloud reported power problems in zone ru-central1-a. After that, the reports show zero.

The server sees normal traffic: on 11 October pages with the counter were opened 47 times from 40 addresses, and by the evening of 12 October 66 times. Metrica shows 6 page views and zero for those days. The interface opens, the API responds and tag.js loads. What is broken is data intake on the Yandex side, not the site or the code.

Honestly, nobody knows. The counter in the browser sends each visit to Yandex servers. If they accepted it into a queue, the numbers may appear later. If the request went nowhere, those days stay empty for good. Yandex has said nothing about it so far.

Do not count on compensation either. According to RBC, Yandex added drone attacks to the force majeure clause of its user agreement. The version dated 18 September had no such clause.

The real danger is not the empty chart but the decisions people make by looking at it.

• Annotate 8–12 October in your reports and do not compare this week with the last one.
• Do not cut ad budgets or roll back site changes because of the drop.
• Check Yandex Direct strategies that optimise for Metrica goals: with no conversions they learn from nothing.
• Count leads in your CRM and inbox, not in goals. Over two weeks our Metrica logged four form submissions, and one real lead arrived.
• While Webmaster is down, look for YandexBot in server logs and submit new pages through IndexNow.

A site whose analytics lives in a single data center goes blind together with it. A second source takes an hour to set up and costs less than one ad campaign switched off by mistake.

• Server logs. Always there and independent of anyone, but hard to read.
• Matomo on your own server. Full control, but you maintain and fix it yourself.
• Google Analytics 4. Works, but data leaves the country, which some Russian companies need to clear with a lawyer.
• Merka, a Yandex Metrica alternative. It imports your history from Metrica through a read-only API and adds its own counter, so past months and new visits sit on one chart. The basic plan is free; it syncs every six hours and retries on failures.