Full Breakdown
Ukrainian Drone Strikes on Yandex Data Centers and the Fallout for Russian Automated Traffic
By Drooid · · How we work
The Strikes and Immediate Outages
On October 8 Ukrainian drones hit Yandex’s largest data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region, damaging equipment that housed two of the company’s three supercomputers. A strike the next day hit a facility in Kaluga City, and on October 11 a third attack forced the Vladimir-region data center, 125 miles east of Moscow, into suspension. Yandex reported service interruptions for its cloud platform, payment wallet, ride-hailing app and other consumer services. The firm arranged temporary hosting with Russian providers VK Cloud, Selectel and K2Cloud.
Drop in Automated Traffic
NetBlocks recorded Yandex Cloud traffic falling to roughly 30 % of normal levels and Yandex LLC traffic to 63 % after the Vladimir strike. Cloudflare’s Radar showed automated HTTP requests from Yandex’s AS13238 network plunge to 0.4 % of the two-week maximum on the day of the attacks, rebounding to 17.3 % by the following afternoon. “Bot” in Cloudflare’s data includes any automated web request, such as search-engine crawlers.
Official Reactions
- Yandex confirmed severe damage to the three sites, noted that its “large-scale manipulation” rules block policy-violating accounts, and issued a public apology.
- Maksut Shadayev, Russia’s Digital Development Minister, said ministries are discussing measures to protect data-center infrastructure from further drone attacks.
- U.S. intelligence agencies have warned that Russia may attempt to influence the November 3 U.S. midterm elections, prompting heightened monitoring of digital disinformation channels.
Expert Analysis and Divergent Views
- Carlos Perez, director of security intelligence at TrustedSec, warned that disruptions could affect a broader range of malicious activity while questioning whether the impact will be temporary or force operators to relocate.
- Jason Vest, CTO at Binary Defense, emphasized that “lower bot traffic alone doesn’t tell us whether phishing, account compromises or efforts to target election-related systems have declined.”
- Researchers at BBC Verify and the monitoring group dTeam reported no measurable change in activity from known Kremlin-linked bot clusters (e.g., Storm-1516, Matryoshka), attributing the Cloudflare decline mainly to Yandex’s own crawlers being throttled after the outages.
Conflicting Reports & Gaps
- Social-media posts linked the traffic collapse to a sharp reduction in pro-Kremlin bots, citing the Cloudflare chart.
- Technical experts countered that the chart measures automated requests to any website, not the volume of disinformation posts, and that no direct evidence shows a decline in coordinated influence operations.
- No publicly available data quantifies changes in the number of active propaganda accounts on platforms such as X or Telegram.
Why It Matters
The attacks illustrate a new “data-center front” in the Russia-Ukraine war, where physical destruction of cloud infrastructure can ripple through commercial services, supply chains and potentially the capacity of state-linked influence campaigns. As U.S. elections approach, analysts monitor whether reduced automated capacity will impair Russia’s ability to amplify disinformation or simply shift it to alternative hosting arrangements.
Verbatim Quotes
- “When we started responding to Russia’s operation against our data centers and when our strikes reached Yandex data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” — Volodymyr Zelenskyy
- “So, I would say a Yandex outage is unlikely to affect their propaganda infrastructure too much,” — Hadi Ghanbari
- “With the midterm elections approaching, the question is whether these disruptions will affect the infrastructure supporting malicious cyber operations or simply force those operations to shift elsewhere," Perez said.” — Carlos Perez
- “Lower bot traffic alone doesn’t tell us whether phishing, account compromises or efforts to target election-related systems have declined," said Vest, who is chief technology officer at Binary Defense.” — Jason Vest
