- Ukrainian drone strikes knock key Yandex data centers offline in Central Russia
- Bot traffic on Yandex networks has dropped significantly as a result, with many services knocked offline and Yandex's Cloud Zones operating with 'limited functionality'
- Data centers are quickly becoming key military targets as intelligence gathering and communications rely on cloud services
Ukraine has launched a series of drone strikes over the past week that have knocked multiple Russian data centers offline, resulting in internet bot traffic from the country dropping to almost zero.
The data centers were operated by Yandex - Russia’s domestic answer to Google - and traffic for the search engine has dropped to just 0.4% of its two week high.
Yandex traffic first dropped on October 8, 2026 after Ukraine struck a data center in Sasovo, Russia, and a second strike on a data center 220 miles to the west of Sasovo on October 10.
Russian bot traffic collapses following strikes
It is important to define what this bot traffic actually is. There is a common tendency to automatically associate 'bot traffic' - especially Russian bot traffic - with the fake social media accounts that spread Kremlin-aligned propaganda. The bot traffic taken offline in this context is more likely to be automated programs that crawl pages, index search results, and gather data for AI platforms.
The drone strikes have been particularly devastating for Yandex’s cloud services. The Yandex Status Board shows that Yandex’s Central Russian Cloud Zones are currently unavailable, and the platform is running in a “limited functionality” mode with most services offline.
Ukraine’s strikes on data centers appear to be retaliatory. Russia began striking Ukrainian data centers in late September under the reasoning that they were being used by Ukrainian military intelligence. A strike on a building within the business center of Kyiv killed four people and knocked internet connectivity offline for 100,000 households in the Kyiv region.
These strikes have been the latest escalation of the war which has been raging since the Russian invasion in 2022, although some observers say the war began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea following the collapse of Ukraine’s Pro-Russian government in 2014.
Since the outbreak of the war, civilian infrastructure has been a key target of strikes by Russia. Energy production and infrastructure has been repeatedly hit in strikes specifically orchestrated to demoralize the Ukrainian population, especially during the winter.
Data centers become a key target
As military intelligence and warfighting capabilities become increasingly digital, data centers have become a key part of war.
At the outbreak of hostilities between Iran and the US and Israel, numerous AWS data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates were struck by missiles knocking numerous services offline in the region.
Iranian media later reported that the strikes were deliberate, and were intended to “to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy's military and intelligence activities.”
To adapt to the role that data centers now play in military conflict, Palantir have begun deploying shipping containers packed with Nvidia's B300 AI accelerators to be used in warzones. They are designed to be quickly set up and capable of processing information within any connection to public cloud infrastructure and can be fully isolated from external networks when required.
Iran’s strikes in the Middle East show just how vulnerable data centers and the infrastructure they rely on are to airborne munitions. Some experts have argued that the US should begin building redundancy and decentralization into the infrastructure required to coordinate logistics, intelligence gathering, and communications.