Ukrainian Armed Forces Strikes On "Yandex" Led To The Disappearance Of Russian Bot Farms
- 13.10.2026, 10:50
Yandex's traffic has come to a standstill.
Following three Ukrainian attacks on Yandex’s data centers, automated traffic from the Russian tech giant’s network has dropped to virtually zero.
The publication Tom’s Hardware highlighted data from Cloudflare: the volume of such requests dropped to 0.4% of its two-week peak. The news spread instantly across the internet with the claim that the world was getting a break from Russian bots. However, the data tells a different story.
Three data centers in four days
The first strike took place on October 8, targeting a data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast. As Tom’s Hardware reported, this is one of Yandex’s five main facilities. It houses tens of thousands of servers and two supercomputers powered by Nvidia A100 chips, which the company uses to train its artificial intelligence models.
The next day, the campus in Kaluga—which Yandex itself calls its largest—was attacked. Fire Point claimed responsibility for the attack on Kaluga: the company stated that it was carried out by its FP-1 long-range drones. On the night of October 11, the drones struck a third facility—in Vladimir. Yandex completely shut down all three. Fire Point responded to this on the social network X.
“Dima, have you tried turning it off and on again?” the company wrote.
As Tom’s Hardware notes, the strikes were a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers. One such attack had previously caused several popular pirated websites to go offline.
“Traffic from Russian bots has dropped sharply over the past few days,” Tom’s Hardware noted.
According to the publication, after the strike on Sasovo, the figure dropped to about 57% of its peak, and after the attack on Vladimir, to 0.4%. The Polish channel TVP World provided an even more striking comparison: 0.3% versus 88% a week earlier.
What Cloudflare Revealed
At the same time, Tom’s Hardware clarifies that Cloudflare considers any automated scripts that download content from the web to be bots. For a search engine, these are primarily crawlers that index websites. Following a wave of criticism, the publication removed the word “disinformation” from its headline.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy linked the attacks specifically to social media. Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum, he said that when Ukrainian strikes hit Yandex’s data centers, “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms.” Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius, speaking at the same forum, called on allies to urge Kyiv to continue striking Russian data centers in order to protect their elections.
Thus, the fact remains. In four days, Ukraine took out three of the five key data centers belonging to Russia’s leading tech giant, and this disrupted Yandex’s search engine, cloud services, and AI development. Whether this has affected Kremlin trolls remains to be seen—only longer-term observation will tell.