During the day, ComNews editorial staff was in touch

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An accident on the MTS Cloud infrastructure occurred on March 17, 2024, at about 4:00 Moscow time. The services of some Russian companies located in the MTS cloud infrastructure became unavailable to users.

On March 17, ComNews contacted MTS Cloud technical support for clarification of the situation. In the morning, support staff reported that the incident had damaged the Storage area network: "This results in the inaccessibility of virtual machines and backups located in the affected cloud segments. The team of technical specialists is taking the necessary actions to restore the functioning of the cloud segments affected by the incident."

with MTS Cloud technical bahamas whatsapp number database support to find out details about the progress of infrastructure restoration work. However, until late in the evening, several times we only received messages about the continuation of work and the "maximum priority" of this task.

On the morning of March 18, MTS Cloud technical support reported a partial restoration of the infrastructure: "Currently, clients' access to the management console, the management layer of a significant part of the virtual infrastructure involved in the incident, has been restored. For a number of clients, the service's operability has already been fully restored; in terms of the remaining segments and services, we are making every effort to restore it as quickly as possible. We have used all possible resources and mechanisms. The work continues with maximum priority." By that time, the work had been going on for more than a day.

An information security expert who wished to remain anonymous suggested that the cause of the accident could have been a hacker attack: "Data processing centers (DPCs) are high-tech facilities that work like clockwork. Service providers that provide data center services use reliable engineering systems and ensure high standards of their security, both physical and network. MTS Cloud has a geo-distributed network of DPCs, and if one DPC fails for some reason, for example, as a result of accidents or climatic conditions, other backup sites ensure reliable operation of the systems. Therefore, failures in three data centers at once may indicate attempts by malicious users to launch targeted attacks on the provider's infrastructure. This could also happen as a result of the human factor - for example, during technical maintenance of data centers."

Another anonymous source told a ComNews correspondent that, in addition to a hacker attack, a mass failure in the data center equipment is possible: "If the failure is observed in all three MTS Cloud data centers, then there may be two options. The first is that they were hacked, which damaged the infrastructure. Restoring it from scratch, and then also customer data, is very problematic. The second option is that the data centers use some common network equipment, and a serious failure occurred in it. If the equipment is rare or expensive, then it will not be possible to quickly replace it. But this is an unlikely scenario. Usually, high-performance (backbone) network equipment provides for redundancy by interfaces, at the backplane level (switching bus and logic) and power supplies. If the backbone switch has three power supplies, then it is unlikely that all three will fail. This is possible only with deliberate damage to the equipment. Hence, there is a version that the problems arose as a result of deliberate actions of an insider. But these are just assumptions, there is no confirmation of this."

Some Russian companies (MTS Cloud clients) reported that they did not observe any problems with access to services and websites.