Complete Beget shutdown 💥

Around 3 a.m. today, Beget, one of Russia’s largest hosting providers, suffered a massive outage. The incident affected hundreds of thousands of customers: websites went down, the control panel crashed, and core services dropped offline (including the app for the state-run “Chestny Znak” marketplace). Naturally, everything I had hosted there went down as well.

What really gets me is the communication: I found out about the outage from public news channels because the team never bothered to notify customers via their official Telegram bot or email. Apparently, both the bot and mail servers were running on their own infrastructure too 🤡 Invoices and payment reminders, on the other hand, arrive in Telegram right on schedule.

To put the scale of the disaster into perspective:

🏆 Top 3 in Russia: Beget consistently ranks among the top three shared hosting and VPS providers in Russia, second only to REG.RU.
🌐 ~500,000 websites: A huge chunk of the Runet runs on their infrastructure, from small online stores to national-scale services.
📦 15% of all .ru domains: Nearly a sixth of all domain names in the .ru zone are registered on the company’s servers.

How is your setup holding up? Did your infrastructure survive, or did you have to spin up backups on third-party VPS instances in a hurry? Are you planning to move away from Russian hosting providers?

Update: it turns out Beget was hacked 💥

The Beget team posted an incident update: on the night of November 2, their infrastructure was hit by a massive cyberattack.

The provider immediately declared force majeure. Legally, the company is preemptively absolving itself of liability for downtime and financial losses suffered by customers.

Where recovery stands right now:

Dedicated servers are back online.
Restoring DNS infrastructure is the top priority, with an estimate of 4–5 hours (though taking nearly a full day to bring primary NS servers back up hints at how deep the problem goes).
Work on restoring email services is still underway.
File backups for most shared hosting and cloud resources are intact, but restoring them will take a long time due to the sheer volume of data.

The team admits it is still assessing the full scale of the damage and cannot give an exact timeline for full recovery. It looks like data was partially corrupted or encrypted, and rebuilding systems from backups is going to be a long road.

Ah yes, “force majeure”…

Update 2: attackers wiped cloud service data

Beget is facing severe fallout from the cyberattack. The company confirmed complete data loss across its VPS, S3, and Kubernetes infrastructures. Binary VPS backups were destroyed alongside them, as well as IP and CDN configurations.

Even so, engineers have managed to restore dedicated servers and have email services nearly back to normal. Customers will also receive extensions on domain delegation periods in Russian domain zones.

Recovery efforts are ongoing.