What happened?
Ukrainian drones struck data centers belonging to Yandex, Russia's largest technology company. According to Cloudflare's measurements, bot traffic from the Yandex network fell to just 0.4% of the highest HTTP request count recorded in the past two weeks. Traffic first dropped to around 57% on Oct. 8, when a data center housing two supercomputers in Sasovo, about 195 miles southeast of Moscow, was hit.
A second blow in Kaluga
The larger Kaluga campus, roughly 220 miles west of Sasovo, was also knocked offline yesterday. Yandex is known as Russia's Google, and its Yandex Cloud status page shows at least 84 services are offline. Global internet monitoring firm NetBlocks said Yandex Cloud traffic fell to 30% and Yandex LLC traffic to 63%, meaning slower internet or complete disruption for ordinary Russian users.
Why it matters
The strikes appear to be a response to Moscow's attacks on Ukrainian data centers. Targeting civilian data centers with drones and missiles is a relatively new development; Russia justifies its strikes by claiming Ukrainian military intelligence used those facilities. Similarly, AWS sites in Bahrain and the UAE have been targeted in conflict zones.
What can ordinary users do?
Falling back on high-speed satellite internet is also difficult for Russian users: Starlink does not work in Russia, and a significant number of the rival Rassvet constellation's existing satellites fell back to the surface after launch. This shows how deeply the war is affecting digital infrastructure.
