Kaspersky’s VPN and password manager were shut down for days around the world, and the timing has raised uncomfortable questions about Russian data centers attacked by drones.
- Kaspersky’s VPN, Password Manager, Safe Kids, and My Kaspersky portal crashed worldwide from October 11 to around October 14.
- The outage began hours after Ukrainian drones shut down Yandex’s Vladimir data center, but no technical link between the two has been proven.
- A viral post calling Kaspersky “virtually dead” was wrong about database updates, password leaks, and its European-only setting – the effect was global and temporary.
Kaspersky customers around the world recently spent several days unable to use the company’s VPN, Password Manager, Safe Kids parental controls or the My Kaspersky account portal, after an outage began within hours of Ukrainian drones forcing a third Yandex data center offline.
The company has blamed technical problems and has not named an underlying cause, but the overlap with the attacks on Russia’s largest technology company has been difficult for users to ignore.
On October 15, 2026, Riga-based commentator Professor Talk (@SergejTalk) told his followers that European users were finding Kaspersky’s antivirus “virtually dead,” with database updates failing, the password manager gone with its contents, and the VPN removed.
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Many of these claims are not supported by the record; The outage itself, however, was real, global and lasted the better part of four days, but it signaled a possible connection to Russian hosting for many of Kaspersky’s key services.
Blocked on four continents: Bad timing or something else?
The first complaints came to Kaspersky’s support forum early on Sunday, October 11, when a user reported that the VPN was refusing to connect on both PC and phone. Within a day, the thread generated reports from Malaysia, Brazil, Italy, Vietnam, Spain, Germany, Iraq, the United Kingdom and Australia, while users in Japan described failed activations and an unreachable VPN on X.
As a result, on October 12, Danila T., a Kaspersky employee and forum moderator, confirmed that some features of Kaspersky and My Kaspersky products were temporarily unavailable, including VPN, Safe Kids and Password Manager, and said that user protection and data were not affected.
A subsequent notice, broadcast in French by moderator Berny, said that VPN issues affected the app on all supported operating systems and that licenses purchased on or after October 10 could face activation delays. Kaspersky said it would automatically extend affected subscriptions to cover the lost time.
The staff, while in damage control mode, also told users not to uninstall or reinstall apps, noting that activation service issues would basically lock them out entirely.
The service returned in stages. Berny reported that My Kaspersky was accessible again on the night of October 13; Users said the VPN was connecting on the morning of October 14, and Danila T. posted that day that “the VPN issue should now be resolved.”
Timing is what gets people talking. Drones attacked Yandex’s Sasovo data center in the Ryazan region during the night of October 7-8, partially disabled its Kaluga site on October 9, and forced the complete shutdown of its Vladimir facility during the night of October 11.
Yandex Cloud was put into emergency mode and customers were advised to activate their own disaster recovery plans. We reported that Yandex search traffic crashed when the company’s cloud zones in central Russia darkened.
Correlation, causality not proven
A detailed timeline of the incident published on Habr places the Vladimir power outage between 04:00 and 06:08 Moscow time on October 11, close to the time Kaspersky VPN users began reporting problems. Kaspersky’s own notice pointing out licenses purchased on October 10 also falls within a window in which two Yandex sites were already damaged.
This is correlation, not causation, and Kaspersky has not said that any consumer services run on Yandex Cloud; None of the reports to date, including Günter Born’s blog and WinFuture, have produced technical evidence that this is the case.
WinFuture has noted that it is still unclear whether Kaspersky is still dependent on Russian data centers. The Yandex collapse also brought down more than a dozen unrelated third-party services, according to The Record, from retailers to TikTok’s Russian arm, so a coincidental failure elsewhere would struggle to stand out.
The same week also reminded everyone how quickly these links strengthen online, often without any real basis in fact. Viral claims that the attacks had silenced Russian troll farms earned a rebuttal from OCCRP senior editor Ilya Lozovsky, who said they have “no basis whatsoever,” noting that the Cloudflare data in question measured automated crawlers rather than social media bots.
Regardless of what is true here, the timing of Kaspersky’s services going offline coinciding with the closure of Russian data centers is worrying for an EU that is already looking to develop its own data security infrastructure and is trying to wean its users away from third-party services from what could be an adversary in the future.
The broader war between data centers shows no signs of letting up. Russian attacks damaged at least six Ukrainian data centers in late September, and the current Ukraine attacks are seen as a tit-for-tat measure rather than an escalation.
For retail customers of Kaspersky services inside or outside the EU, the practical lesson is more concrete: local protection continued to work, which is more important for antivirus software.
But anyone relying on the company’s VPN or cloud-synced password manager has just seen how an outage far from their own machine can take away those tools for days. Those who want a reliable plan B can find alternatives in our guide to the best antivirus software or the best VPN solutions for their specific use cases.
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