Computers & internet

Yandex Services Begin to Return After Drone Strikes on Data Centers

Does the drop in Yandex bot traffic expose Kremlin-backed manipulation or a lack of digital technical knowledge?

2 hours ago·Updated 1 hour ago

Yandex Services Begin to Return After Drone Strikes on Data Centers

Story

Above: The Yandex logo taken on Sept. 29. Image credit: Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

The Facts

Yandex said Monday that its services were gradually coming back online following Ukrainian strikes last week, with engineers restoring search, maps, mail, taxi and the Alice AI assistant.
Yandex on X
Radio Free Europe
TASS
A drone strike early Sunday damaged Yandex's data center in the Vladimir region, which hosts the Galushkin supercomputer, halting operations. NetBlocks reported that traffic tied to the company's cloud services dropped to approximately 30% compared to earlier levels.
TVP World
NetBlocks on X
RT International
Meanwhile, Cloudflare Radar data showed automated traffic from Yandex's AS13238 network fell Sunday to about 0.4% of the maximum HTTP requests logged in the previous two weeks. By Monday afternoon it had recovered to 17.3%, Newsweek reported.
Cloudflare
Newsweek
Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday, Zelenskyy claimed that once strikes reached Yandex data centers, it became "a little easier to breathe" on social media, with "less hate, less division" and fewer provocations due to fewer bots.
Radio Free Europe
The London Economic
Volodymyr Zelenskyy on X
However, the majority of reported disrupted activity has so far been connected to automated requests to websites, with most of the decline coming from Yandex's own search crawlers, which index webpages, rather than accounts active on social media.
EuroNews
Bot Blocker on X
Mashable
The Vladimir strike was the third on Yandex facilities in four days, after drones hit the Sasovo site in the Ryazan region Thursday and a Kaluga region data center Friday. Sasovo housed two of Yandex's three supercomputers used to train AI systems.
Newsweek
TASS
Anonymous on X

Sources Split

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The Spin

Narrative A

The sudden calm online makes Yandex's role in Moscow's influence machine hard to dismiss. Kremlin-friendly bot networks have long distorted democratic debate while posing as homegrown populism. Disrupting adversarial infrastructure protects authentic political speech from foreign manipulation and exposes Russia's hybrid manipulation.

Chad Scott on X

Tomáš Zdechovský on X

Volodymyr Zelenskyy on X

Narrative B

A dip in Yandex bot traffic is no smoking gun for Kremlin propaganda. Conflating routine web crawling with social media manipulation is a basic technical mistake that exposes a host of "digital" experts on social media. If Russia is waging information warfare, strikes against Yandex data centers will play little part in its suppression.

Anonymous on X

Bot Blocker on X