Yandex Bot Traffic Collapses After Ukrainian Drone Strikes on Russian Data Centers

Yandex Network Traffic Plummets

Bot traffic from Yandex's network has collapsed in recent days after Ukrainian drone strikes disabled several of the Russian tech giant's largest data centers. According to Cloudflare, automated traffic from the Yandex network fell to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded over the past two weeks.

The first drop occurred on October 8, when traffic fell to around 57% after Ukraine struck a Yandex data center in Sasovo, Russia, located roughly 195 miles southeast of the Kremlin. That facility housed two supercomputers. A second and larger Yandex campus in Kaluga, about 220 miles west of Sasovo, was knocked offline shortly afterward, and a third attack targeted a data center in Vladimir on the morning of October 11, according to global internet monitoring firm NetBlocks.

Widespread Service Disruption

Yandex, often described as Russia's equivalent of Google, confirmed through its Yandex Cloud service status page that at least 84 services are currently offline. NetBlocks reported that Yandex's network traffic has fallen to 30% for Yandex Cloud and 63% for Yandex LLC, likely resulting in slower internet services or complete disruption for ordinary Russian users.

The attacks are widely seen as Ukraine's response to Moscow's strikes on Ukrainian data centers, which caused outages affecting some of the country's most popular piracy websites. Unlike in other conflict zones, ordinary Russians cannot easily turn to high speed satellite internet as a backup, since Starlink does not operate in Russia and the competing Rassvet constellation has seen a significant number of its satellites fall back to the surface after launch.

Drone Warfare Expands to Civilian Infrastructure

The strikes on data centers mark a notable escalation in a conflict that has increasingly embraced drone warfare. What began with the wide deployment of commercially available drones for reconnaissance, dropping explosives, and kamikaze style attacks has evolved into long range operations, with specially built drones able to reach distances of over 1,500 miles and destroy Tu-95 strategic bombers far behind the front lines.

Russia has justified its attacks on civilian data centers by claiming Ukrainian military intelligence used them. However, such facilities are not new targets in the broader regional conflict. AWS sites in Bahrain and the UAE have been hit multiple times since Washington began its bombing campaign against Iran, with the company advising clients to move their data to sites outside the region as it has no recovery timeline.

Sources: Tom'S Hardware