Over the past weekend, Yandex Go's taxi and delivery services stopped working in Kazakhstan, and users on social media are actively discussing what to replace the familiar app with. The outages are reported by infohub.kz.
Yandex Go's press service confirmed the outages and apologized to those who use taxi and delivery services, as well as to drivers and couriers. On social media, users speculate that the outages are linked to a drone attack on Yandex infrastructure in Russia. At the same time, the Dodo Pizza app also stopped working. The company explained that a major accident at a cloud provider, on whose infrastructure its services run, was to blame. The provider's name was not officially disclosed.
Meanwhile, Kazakhstanis are discussing alternatives to all these services. Under discussions about the taxi service's malfunction, nearly a dozen Kazakh services are being advertised. Some operate on the inDrive model and offer ride-sharing.
Incidentally, inDrive itself initially found itself in a scandal: demand in the app surged, and prices simultaneously skyrocketed. Its founder, Arsen Tomsky, reacted quickly. He wrote on his Threads that the commission for drivers was reduced on Sunday, which helped attract tens of thousands of new people. The company also limited the bargaining range to lower prices.
"We received tens of thousands of new requests from drivers, many quickly got on the road, and prices started falling within a few hours," the businessman wrote.
As for the much-talked-about Green SM, which was called a possible competitor to Yandex.Taxi, its accounts showed no reaction to the sudden surge in demand. On social media, Kazakhstanis wrote that the company had few drivers left, so waiting times increased compared to August-September.
Kazakhstanis also recall how they used to get around the city by car when there were no major taxi services: they would negotiate with drivers who agreed to give rides to fellow travelers.
People are nostalgic about how they used to travel from one end of Almaty to the other for 500 tenge, and recall jokes about this "people's service."
"When they stopped like that and stood for a long time while passing by, dad would say: 'Look, an interview is going on,' 'That's how we learned to behave in aggressive negotiations and not to cave in,' users write.
It's worth adding that Yandex Go had long and systematically been pushing competitor companies out of the market, but now customers don't understand why the tech giant had no backup plan for data center outages. As a result, the operation of such major sectors as taxi and delivery turned out to be dependent on events in a neighboring country.
Earlier, Kursiv wrote that over the past few days, Ukrainian drones had attacked Yandex's large data centers in various regions of Russia several times.