Ukrainian drone attacks sharply reduce Yandex bot traffic and disrupt Russian cloud services
Cloudflare data indicates that bot traffic from Yandex's network fell to 0.4% of its recent peak after Ukrainian drone strikes hit major data centers. The attacks damaged facilities in Sasovo and Kaluga, leaving many Yandex Cloud services offline and cutting overall network traffic. The strikes were a response to Russian attacks on data centers in Kyiv.
Cloudflare observed Yandex network bot traffic plunge to 0.4% of its two-week HTTP request high. An initial decline to roughly 57% occurred on Oct. 8, after a strike on a Sasovo facility containing two supercomputers. A larger Kaluga campus was later taken offline.
Yandex Cloud’s status page listed at least 84 services down. NetBlocks measured network traffic at 30% for Yandex Cloud and 63% for Yandex LLC. The strikes followed Russian attacks on Kyiv data centers, part of a conflict where long-range drones now reach far behind front lines.
The disruption may degrade everyday digital services for Russian users, businesses, and cloud customers relying on Yandex. With bot traffic reduced, some online abuse, scraping, or automated activity could decline, though legitimate services may also suffer. Because satellite alternatives appear limited, affected users could face slower or unavailable connectivity. The incident may also heighten awareness that data centers are vulnerable infrastructure in modern conflict.