Ukrainian drones strike Yandex data centers

Ukrainian drones attacked three Yandex data centers between October 8 and October 11, 2026. The attacks caused significant damage and led to the shutdown of operations at these sites.

Fire destroys key data center in Riazan

On October 8, Ukrainian drones reached the Sasovo data center in the Riazan region. A fire devastated the site, which hosted two of the three supercomputers of the Yandex group. The company announced the complete shutdown of its operations at this location.

Further strikes disrupt Yandex operations

The next day, a second strike hit the Kalouga center, the largest in the park. Then on October 11, the Vladimir site ceased to function in turn. These attacks significantly disrupted Yandex's operations across multiple locations.

Automated traffic drops sharply

Automated traffic linked to Russian bots fell by 94 percent following the attacks. The decline in bot activity was sudden, and online support for far-right movements collapsed immediately in Europe and the United States.

Yandex advises customers to migrate data

Requests from the Yandex system dropped to 0.4 percent of their peak in two weeks, according to Le Parisien. The decline reached 94 percent compared to the end of September, and 84 cloud services have failed. The company advised its customers to urgently migrate their files.

Link between outages and bot decline debated

However, the observation deserves a cautious reading. The measurement platform evaluates automated HTTP requests from indexing robots that feed the Russian search engine. Their disappearance does not necessarily mean that of active troll accounts on social networks. Some analysts dispute the link.