On September 7, 2012, emergency messages appeared in the feeds of all news agencies that the Yandex office was on fire. The headlines of this news, which were read by many Internet users, turned out to be not entirely correct in the end.
Indeed, in the early morning of Friday in the premises of one of the office centers of Moscow, located at 16 Lev Tolstoy Street, a fire broke out. However, the employees of the world famous company Yandex, which has a leading position in the Russian Internet market, do not yet work in this office.
The administrative three-storey building is under reconstruction, there has been a major overhaul for quite some time now. And only when the construction work is over, Yandex plans to lease offices and place its staff there.
However, the news genre has its own laws, and when the media wrote that the “Yandex office” was on fire, they probably planned to attract readers in this way. The journalists certainly succeeded in this.
Nevertheless, as the saying goes, "there is no smoke without fire." And in this case, the Russian proverb turned out to be relevant. According to the press service of the Moscow Department of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, information about the fire was received by the rescuers' console on September 7 at 9 hours 45 minutes Moscow time.
In the building where construction work is underway, wooden scaffolding broke out. The fire spread quickly. It covered an area of over 15 square meters. And the employees of the most famous Internet company just went to work in their offices located in a neighboring building, which is tightly adjacent to the fire site. Therefore, it was decided to urgently evacuate people.
Within 15 minutes after receiving the fire signal, several fire brigades arrived at the scene. The press secretary of Yandex Ochir Mandzhikov told reporters that they managed to cope with the fire very quickly: literally at 10:30 the raging flame was extinguished. The press service of the Ministry of Emergency Situations said that they managed to do without victims and injured, although the employees of "Yandex", of course, felt the smell of smoke. Mandzhikov also assured that the incident did not affect the functioning of the servers of the largest search engine. Already at 11 o'clock, all Yandex employees were back at their workplaces.
