Deleting a VM

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Updated at June 30, 2026

Warning

Deleting a VM is permanent and cannot be undone, so you cannot recover a deleted VM.

When selecting a disk to attach to your VM, you can specify whether to delete that disk when deleting the VM. You can enable this option when creating or updating a VM, or when attaching a new disk to it.

Disks attached to a VM prior to its deletion will automatically be detached. The disk data will be preserved, and you will be able to attach these disks to another VM when needed.

Management console

CLI

Terraform

API

In the management console, select the folder this VM belongs to.
Navigate to Compute Cloud.
Next to the VM you want to delete, click → Delete.

To delete multiple VMs, select them from the list and click Delete at the bottom of the screen.
In the window that opens, click Delete.

If you do not have the Yandex Cloud CLI yet, install and initialize it.

The folder used by default is the one specified when creating the CLI profile. To change the default folder, use the yc config set folder-id <folder_ID> command. You can also specify a different folder for any command using --folder-name or --folder-id. If you access a resource by its name, the search will be limited to the default folder. If you access a resource by its ID, the search will be global, i.e., through all folders based on access permissions.

See the description of the CLI command for deleting a VM:
```
yc compute instance delete --help
```

Get a list of VMs in the default folder:

yc compute instance list

Result:

+----------------------+-----------------+---------------+---------+----------------------+
|          ID          |       NAME      |    ZONE ID    | STATUS  |     DESCRIPTION      |
+----------------------+-----------------+---------------+---------+----------------------+
| fhm0b28lgfp4******** | first-instance  | ru-central1-a | RUNNING | my first vm via CLI  |
| fhm9gk85nj7g******** | second-instance | ru-central1-a | RUNNING | my second vm via CLI |
+----------------------+-----------------+---------------+---------+----------------------+

Select the ID or NAME of the VM, e.g., first-instance.

Delete the VM:

yc compute instance delete first-instance

If you do not have Terraform yet, install it and configure the Yandex Cloud provider.

To manage infrastructure using Terraform under a service account or user accounts (a Yandex account, a federated account, or a local user), authenticate using the appropriate method.

To delete a VM created using Terraform, follow these steps:

In the command line, navigate to the directory with the Terraform configuration file.
Delete the resources using this command:
```
terraform destroy
```
Alert

Terraform will delete all the resources you created in the current configuration, such as clusters, networks, subnets, and VMs.
Type yes and press Enter.

Use the delete REST API method for the Instance resource or the InstanceService/Delete gRPC API call.

Deleting a VM

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