Russia's Yandex Bot Traffic Plunges to 0.4% of Recent Peak After Ukraine Drone Strikes

Automated traffic from Russian technology giant Yandex's network plunged to just 0.4% of its recent peak following a series of drone strikes that damaged three of the company's data centres, disrupting digital services across Russia.

The sharp decline has fuelled speculation about whether the attacks could affect Russian online influence operations ahead of the US midterm elections. But while the disruption to Yandex's infrastructure is clear, the traffic figures do not show that political bot networks have been dismantled.

Three Drone Strikes Hit Yandex Data Centres

The incidents unfolded between 8 and 11 October, hitting facilities operated by Yandex, often described as Russia's equivalent of Google.

The first strike seriously damaged the company's data centre in Sasovo, in Russia's Ryazan region, overnight on 7–8 October. Yandex said the facility had been shut down following a fire. It houses two of the company's three AI supercomputers, although the extent of any damage to the machines themselves has not been confirmed.

On 9 October, another strike hit Yandex's facility in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow. The company said part of its infrastructure had been knocked out of service, but the entire site was not confirmed to have shut down.

A third attack damaged the company's data centre in the Vladimir region on 11 October, forcing it offline. Yandex reported no injuries at the affected facilities and said it was assessing the damage and working to restore services. Reuters reported the shutdown of the Vladimir site.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described Kyiv's response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres as 'mirror-like'. His remarks placed the incidents within a wider cycle of strikes against digital infrastructure, but do not independently establish his direct role in ordering each attack.

Why Did Automated Traffic Fall to 0.4%?

The reported figures are striking. Following the Sasovo incident, automated requests from Yandex's network fell to around 57% of the maximum recorded over the preceding two weeks. After the subsequent disruptions, they dropped to approximately 0.4% of that peak, according to reporting citing Cloudflare Radar data.

The measure tracks HTTP requests classified as automated traffic originating from Yandex's network. It is a relative comparison with a recent peak, not a count of all Russian bots or a measure of internet activity across Russia.

Cloudflare's public reporting on 8 October also recorded a separate change: traffic from Yandex Cloud's network was averaging about 33% below normal after the Sasovo incident. That figure measures a different network and should not be confused with the later 0.4% automated-traffic reading.

The distinction matters because automated requests serve many purposes. They can come from legitimate search-engine crawlers and commercial software, as well as potentially malicious systems. A sharp fall could therefore reflect damaged infrastructure and reduced network activity without revealing who operated the affected systems or what they were doing.

Reporting published on 12 October indicated that automated traffic had partly recovered after its steepest decline. The 0.4% figure should consequently be understood as a reported low point relative to the recent peak, not proof that traffic remained at that level.

More Than 80 Services Reportedly Disrupted

The impact extended beyond traffic charts. Reports identified disruptions affecting more than 80 digital services, including Yandex Music, the Alice voice assistant, Smart Home and Telemost video conferencing. Yandex Cloud services were also affected, while third-party banking, retail and ride-hailing applications reportedly experienced problems.

For businesses relying on cloud computing, outages can interrupt access to computing resources, databases and systems needed to serve customers. The scale of the reported disruption highlights how damage to a handful of major facilities can ripple across interconnected services.

The attacks have also raised questions about Russia's AI ambitions. Sasovo housed two of Yandex's three AI supercomputers, but the company has not confirmed that the machines themselves were damaged. The longer-term impact on its AI development and cloud capacity remains uncertain.

Could Russian Influence Operations Be Affected?

Automated accounts can be used to amplify political messages, manipulate online discussions and spread misleading information. With the US midterm elections approaching, any disruption to Russian-linked influence networks would be significant.

However, the Cloudflare figures do not establish that the affected requests were linked to political manipulation, Kremlin-directed campaigns or efforts to influence American voters. Nor do they demonstrate that disrupting such activity was the purpose of the strikes.

Establishing that connection would require separate evidence identifying the operators behind the traffic, the activity they conducted and any links to documented influence campaigns.

For now, the clearest finding is that successive drone strikes have disrupted important parts of Yandex's digital infrastructure, with consequences for cloud services, AI resources and other platforms. The collapse in automated traffic offers a measure of that disruption, but its implications for Russian online influence operations remain unproven.