Full Breakdown
Ukrainian Drone Strikes Cripple Yandex Data Centers, Disrupt Russian Online Propaganda
By Drooid · · How we work
Core Event: Ukrainian Drone Attacks Shut Down Three Yandex Facilities
On the night of October 8, a Ukrainian drone strike hit the Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region, damaging two of the company’s three supercomputers. A second strike on October 9 damaged infrastructure at the Kaluga facility. A third strike overnight on October 11 forced the Yandex data center in the Vladimir region to shut down completely. The attacks knocked out roughly half of Yandex’s six data centers and triggered outages of Yandex-hosted services across Russia and neighboring countries.
Background & Context: Yandex’s Central Role and Russia’s “Sovereign Internet”
Yandex controls about 70 percent of the Russian search market and operates a “superapp” that bundles ride-hailing, food delivery, payments and cloud services. Since 2015 the Russian government’s “sovereign internet” policy requires personal-data processing to remain on domestic servers and places DNS and routing under Roskomnadzor, making Yandex’s data centers a strategic vulnerability.
Data & Statistics: Bot Activity and Service Outages
- The Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) tracked 22,664 messages from 5,201 suspicious accounts between October 6-12. The steepest drop occurred on October 8, when daily messages fell from 4,032 to 660 (-83.6 %).
- Telegram message volume fell by 90 % and Facebook by 79.5 % that day.
- After a brief rebound, messages fell again on October 12 to 2,704 (-42.6 %) and active accounts to 1,166 (-41 %).
- Cloudflare Radar showed automated HTTP requests from Yandex’s AS13238 network drop to 0.3 % of the weekly maximum on October 11, down from 88.2 % a week earlier; 99.6 % of those requests were classified as automated.
- Service disruptions included Yandex Pay balances disappearing (e.g., 1.5 million rubles lost by a Moscow resident), taxi-app order failures and inability to withdraw earnings, forcing drivers to abandon rentals.
- All three Yandex supercomputers — Chervonenkis, Lyapunov and Galushkin — were built with AMD processors and Nvidia A100 accelerators; damage threatens ongoing AI model training.
Official Statements & Responses
- President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12 that “everyone noticed” a drop in Russian bot activity after the strikes.
- Yandex said customers’ money is safe and that it is working to restore services.
- Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev said on October 16 that Moscow and Washington were discussing joint data-center projects, including proposals to use Russian nuclear-generated electricity.
- President Vladimir Putin publicly acknowledged the impact of the strikes on Russian digital services.
Why It Matters: Vulnerabilities in Russia’s Digital Infrastructure
The concentration of Yandex’s cloud, payment and AI resources in a few domestic facilities created a single point of failure. Disabling those centers halted online marketplaces, electronic payments, ride-hailing and smart-home functions for millions of users in Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The loss of supercomputing capacity hampers Russia’s AI development amid Nvidia-chip export controls and triggered price spikes for alternative ride-sharing services in Central Asia.
Conflicting Reports & Gaps
- United 24 media and CCD measured a 90 % Telegram decline, whereas Popular-mechanics reported a 94 % drop in “automated traffic.” The latter aggregates all automated HTTP requests, not solely social-media bots, leaving uncertainty about the true scale of bot disappearance.
- Cloudflare’s classification of 99.6 % of Yandex-origin requests as automated does not differentiate between search crawlers, monitoring tools and propaganda bots, so the extent to which the strikes silenced coordinated disinformation accounts remains unverified.