According to reports from ComNews and Anti-Malware, the incident began around 3:00 AM Moscow time on November 2. Users across 33 Russian cities reported that websites, virtual private servers (VPS), email systems, and DNS services were unavailable. The provider's own control panel and client dashboard also went offline, with servers returning a "502 Bad Gateway" error. By the evening, monitoring services had registered nearly 10,000 complaints.
Beget is one of Russia's largest hosting providers, serving over 200,000 clients. It hosts more than 334,500 active websites, accounting for nearly 15% of all operational sites on the Russian internet. The outage impacted various prominent services, including the web portal for Chestny Znak (Russia's national product marking and tracking system), the BelkaCar car-sharing service, Yandex Pay, and several regional government websites.
Company representatives officially confirmed that their infrastructure was targeted by a massive cyberattack, declaring it a force majeure event. Beget engineers had to manually configure the infrastructure directly at the data centers. The provider prioritized restoring unmanaged dedicated servers and NS servers, though the press service noted that full data recovery would take more time.
What this means for users
- Service availability: While some core functions are being restored, full recovery of all services and client data is expected to take considerable time. Exact deadlines have not yet been announced.
- Compensations: Industry experts cited by ComNews note that standard service-level agreements (SLAs) typically limit a provider's liability. This means affected businesses are likely to receive only a partial refund of subscription fees for the downtime, rather than full compensation for lost sales.
- Best practices: The incident highlights the risks of relying on a single provider for both primary hosting and backups. Cybersecurity specialists recommend distributing critical services across multiple platforms and keeping backup files strictly separate from the main operational environment.
Sources
This story is based on these reports (in Russian).
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