Users of Yandex’s Russian voice assistant Alice are reporting freezes, search errors, and problems with word pronunciation. Complaints have increased after attacks on the company’s Russian data centers, but a direct link between infrastructure damage and the assistant’s performance has not yet been confirmed.
Users of Yandex’s Russian voice assistant Alice are reporting freezes, search errors, and problems with word pronunciation. Complaints have increased after attacks on the company’s Russian data centers, but a direct link between infrastructure damage and the assistant’s performance has not yet been confirmed.
According to The Moscow Times, users complain that Alice hears questions but doesn’t answer them or only responds to certain commands. The assistant also often offers irrelevant information, freezes, and mispronounces words.
Some users have noticed changes in pronunciation: the assistant can pronounce a word correctly, but incorrectly place the stress in a sentence. Others write that the answers have become less accurate, and the service’s behavior is less friendly.
According to DownDetector data cited by the publication, the number of complaints about Alice’s performance began to increase in late October. Over the past two weeks, they have increased approximately fivefold.
As a reminder, in October, the Ukrainian Defense Forces struck three Yandex data centers — in the Ryazan region, Kaluga, and Vladimir. According to The Moscow Times, all three facilities stopped working. Their declared capacity was 12 MW, 63 MW, and 40 MW, respectively.
Following the attacks, the Yandex Cloud platform was put into emergency mode. Two availability zones — ru-central1-a and ru-central1-b — stopped working, and the rest of the company’s IT infrastructure is described by the publication as unstable.
The outages affected not only Yandex services. Problems arose in the work of Russian taxi services, banking applications, systems of the Federal Tax Service and arbitration courts. Among the companies whose services were also affected, the publication names Dodo Pizza, M.Video, Lenta and Magnit.
On November 10, Yandex reported the irreversible loss of 2,84% of user data. The company will not be able to restore it.
The damaged data centers housed three Yandex supercomputers — Chervonenkis, Galushkin, and Lyapunov. According to a Kommersant source, they accounted for 73% of the computing power of Russian supercomputers. Another 23% was provided by the Sbera supercomputer.
The market assumed that replacing the damaged equipment could take up to six months. Yandex itself previously stated that the supercomputers were not affected by the attacks and would be deployed on new sites.
