Bot traffic on Yandex, which Tom's Hardware calls Russia's Google, nearly vanished overnight after Ukraine drone strikes crippled several of its data centers.
Russian bot traffic has dropped sharply over the past few days after Ukraine knocked out major Yandex data centers, with a third attack reported last night. Cloudflare reports that bot traffic from the Yandex network has fallen to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded over the past two weeks. The decline began on October 8, when traffic dropped to around 57%, after Ukraine struck a Yandex data center housing two supercomputers in Sasovo, Russia, about 195 miles southeast of the Kremlin. A second, larger Yandex campus in Kaluga, roughly 220 miles west of Sasovo, was knocked offline yesterday. These attacks are apparently Ukraine's response to Moscow's strikes on its own data centers, some of which caused outages at several of the most popular piracy websites.
Yandex is Russia's equivalent of Google. Its Yandex Cloud service status page reports that at least 84 services are currently offline. Global internet monitoring firm NetBlocks said Yandex's network traffic has dropped to 30% for Yandex Cloud and 63% for Yandex LLC, likely resulting in slower internet service or complete disruption for the average Russian. Ordinary Russians would be unable to rely on high-speed satellite internet as a backup, since Starlink does not operate in Russia, and the competing Rassvet constellation has seen a number of its existing satellites fall back to the surface after launch.
A post on X highlighted the disruption:
"⚠️ Confirmed: Metrics show a second collapse in the networks of Russian tech giant Yandex after a new Ukrainian drone attack on data centers in Vladimir this morning. The campaign comes not long after Russia's threat to give Ukraine a 'digital detox.'" (October 11, 2026)
These incidents are part of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which escalated dramatically in 2022 after Russia's failed attempt to capture Kyiv. Many observers, however, say the war began in 2014, when Russian forces seized Crimea and occupied parts of eastern Ukraine following the fall of the pro-Russian government that year.
The hostilities, which have dragged on for years, have driven the introduction of new technologies and tactics, particularly in drone warfare. The conflict began with the widespread deployment of commercially available drones at the front, typically for reconnaissance, dropping explosives, and kamikaze-style attacks. It has since evolved into long-range warfare, with purpose-built drones capable of traveling more than 1,500 miles and destroying Tu-95 strategic bombers stationed well behind the front lines.
Strikes on data centers are a relatively new development. While data centers located on military bases are often considered legitimate targets, Russia's justification for attacks on civilian data centers was that Ukrainian military intelligence used them. Civilian data centers have been hit by drones and missiles before. AWS facilities in Bahrain and the UAE have been struck multiple times since Washington began its bombing campaign against Iran. The company has told its clients to move their data to sites outside the region, as it has no recovery timeline.