Kaspersky's VPN and password manager went dark for days worldwide — and the timing has raised awkward questions about Russia's drone-hit data centers

Kaspersky's VPN, Password Manager, Safe Kids, and My Kaspersky portal failed worldwide from October 11 to roughly October 14 The outage began hours after Ukrainian drones shut down Yandex's Vladimir data center, but no technical link has been shown between the two A viral post calling Kaspersky "practically dead" was wrong on database updates, lost passwords, and its Europe-only framing - the effect was global and temporary Kaspersky customers worldwide recently spent several days unable to use the company's VPN, Password Manager, Safe Kids parental controls, or 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 issues and has not named an underlying cause - but the overlap with the strikes on Russia's biggest tech firm has been hard 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 "practically dead," with database updates failing, the password manager gone along with its contents, and the VPN wiped out.

Many of those claims don't hold up to the record; the outage itself, however, was real, global, and lasted the better part of four days, but it did point to a potential connection to Russian hosting for many of Kaspersky's key services.

Locked out on four continents: Bad timing or something more? The first complaints landed on Kaspersky's support forum early on Sunday, October 11, when a user reported the VPN refusing to connect on both PC and phone.

Within a day, the thread had drawn reports from Malaysia, Brazil, Italy, Vietnam, Spain, Germany, Iraq, the UK, and Australia, while users in Japan described failed activations and an unreachable VPN on X.

As a result, on October 12, Kaspersky employee and forum moderator Danila T. confirmed that some features in Kaspersky products and on My Kaspersky were temporarily unavailable, naming VPN, Safe Kids, and Password Manager, and said protection and user data were unaffected.

A later notice, relayed in French by moderator Berny, said the VPN problems hit the app on every supported operating system, and that licenses bought from October 10 onward could face activation delays.

Kaspersky said it would extend affected subscriptions automatically to cover the lost time.

The staff, while in damage-control mode, also told users not to uninstall or reinstall applications, noting that the activation service issues would essentially lock them out of the applications altogether.

Service came back in stages.

Berny reported My Kaspersky was reachable again on the evening of October 13; users said the VPN was connecting by the morning of October 14, and Danila T.