YandexBot activity drops sharply

YandexBot, a Russian indexing robot commonly found in website logs, has been unusually quiet in recent days. This decline is linked to the destruction of several buildings housing Yandex servers, including a fire in Sasovo, southeast of Moscow, during the night of October 7 to 8.

Fire disrupts major Yandex infrastructure

The fire in Sasovo, reportedly caused by a drone attack, led to the shutdown of a Yandex site hosting tens of thousands of servers with an electrical capacity of 12 MW. This facility included two of the three supercomputers used to train YandexGPT, a large language model.

Outages spread to other Yandex locations

On October 9, several modules of the Kalouga site also experienced outages, and Yandex announced the complete shutdown of the Vladimir site on October 11. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky mentioned that Kyiv was responding "in mirror" to Russian strikes targeting Ukrainian data centers since September.

Traffic from Yandex drops dramatically

Cloudflare Radar, which tracks automated HTTP requests from Yandex's main network (AS13238), reported a significant drop in traffic following the Sasovo incident. Traffic had fallen to about 57% of its level after Sasovo, before plunging to 0.4% of its peak over the last two weeks.

Yandex's capacity suffers measurable loss

NetBlocks, which monitors network connectivity, measured Yandex Cloud at 30% of normal capacity. The affected robots are primarily the crawlers used for indexing the web for the search engine and feeding the Alice assistant. Some have suggested this could impact Russian disinformation efforts, possibly affecting the American elections in November, but no data supports this claim.

Outages disrupt Russian services and markets

In Russia, the outage has had noticeable effects, disrupting websites of Russian railways, operator MegaFon, and several media outlets hosted in Sasovo. Yandex Disk and Yandex Documents were also affected, and the company's stock lost about 4% on the Moscow Stock Exchange.

Yandex faces challenges in recovery

Yandex stated it is "very difficult" to predict the return of the equipment, and Western sanctions complicate the replacement of high-end chips that have been destroyed. With two large sites still operational in the Moscow region, Yandex must decide which services to prioritize.