Bot Traffic from Yandex’s Network Falls to Near Zero After Third Drone Strike

Automated traffic from Yandex’s network has fallen to near zero after drone strikes on three Yandex data centers, according to Cloudflare Radar data. Several posts call it Russian bot traffic, but the data counts automated requests without saying who ran them.

Radar’s chart for the network, AS13238, shows requests dropping around October 8 and falling to near zero around the start of October 11, UTC. At 02:00 UTC that day, requests stood at 0.3% of the chart’s maximum, against 88.2% for the same hour a week earlier. As of this writing, requests recovered only slightly.

Drones hit a Yandex data center in Sasovo, in Ryazan region, overnight into October 8 and one in Kaluga on October 9. The line shows no visible change on October 9. Yandex then said a drone attack forced its Vladimir facility offline on October 11, a strike reports place early that morning. Outages hit Yandex’s voice assistant, music and cloud services and third-party banking and retail apps.

The chart can’t separate fewer bots from fewer working servers. It tracks HTTP requests that Cloudflare classifies as bots, and the page shows bots making up 99.6% of requests from the network over seven days, so automated traffic dominates in normal times. The chart’s comparison line for the prior week also shows a deep dip and recovery before the strikes began. With much of Yandex’s infrastructure offline, automated requests would likely fall whether or not any influence operation ran there.

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One security-news site says Yandex hosts significant infrastructure for such operations but offers no evidence. X user Chad Scott pairs the data with an earlier estimate that bots wrote roughly 21% to 29% of US Twitter content and notes the US midterms are weeks away. 

Ukraine hasn’t officially claimed the strikes, though Yandex has pointed to Ukraine for the Kaluga attack. President Volodymyr Zelensky said after the first strike, “We always respond in mirror-like fashion,” adding that Russia keeps hitting Ukrainian data centers. Russia has hit several since September, including six or more damaged in late September.