Kaspersky's VPN, Password Manager, Safe Kids parental controls and My Kaspersky account portal failed worldwide from October 11 to roughly October 14, and the company has not said why.
The first complaint reached Kaspersky's support forum on October 11, from a user whose VPN would not connect on PC or phone. Within a day, reports had come in from Malaysia, Brazil, Italy, Vietnam, Spain, Germany, Iraq, the UK and Australia. On October 12, a Kaspersky moderator confirmed that some features were temporarily unavailable and said protection and user data were unaffected. A later notice said licenses bought from October 10 onward could face activation delays, and that the VPN problem hit every supported operating system. Staff told users not to uninstall or reinstall anything, since the activation problem could lock them out. Kaspersky said it would extend affected subscriptions automatically. My Kaspersky returned on the evening of October 13, and the VPN was connecting by the morning of October 14.
The timing explains the attention. Drones hit Yandex's Sasovo data center overnight on October 7 to 8, partly disabled its Kaluga site on October 9, and forced its Vladimir facility offline overnight into October 11. A published incident timeline puts the Vladimir power failure between 04:00 and 06:08 Moscow time on October 11, close to when VPN complaints began.
That is correlation only. Kaspersky has not said any consumer service runs on Yandex Cloud, and none of the coverage so far has shown technical evidence that one does. A viral post on October 15 calling the antivirus "practically dead" in Europe also overreached: the outage was global, temporary, and did not wipe anyone's passwords.
The more durable point is architectural. Local antivirus kept working, which is the part that matters most. The VPN, the activation system and the cloud-synced vault all depend on servers far from the user's machine, and a licensing fault can take them away together. If those servers do sit partly in Russia, as some observers suspect, European regulators already wary of third-party dependencies will have a concrete case to point to. For now, that is an open question only Kaspersky can answer.