Yandex data centers hit three times in four days, and its bot traffic went quiet

Описание: Drones hit three of Yandex's four Yandex Cloud data centers in four days. Overnight, automated traffic from Yandex's network fell to almost zero. Here's what we know, and what the data does not show.

The three sites:
• Oct 8, Sasovo (Ryazan region): up to 12 MW, fire reported. Two of Yandex's three AI supercomputers are there.
• Oct 9, Kaluga: 63 MW, Yandex's largest. Several modules completely disabled, Yandex says. Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point says its FP-1 drones struck it.
• Oct 11, Vladimir: about 56 MW. A fire overnight; completely shut down, Yandex says.
The fourth, Mytishchi near Moscow, was not hit.

The measurements:
• NetBlocks: two steps down in connectivity. Yandex Cloud at 30% of normal, Yandex's main network at 63%.
• Yandex Cloud's own status page listed at least 84 services offline.
• Cloudflare Radar: Yandex's bot traffic fell to the floor overnight after a steady week. 99.6% of requests from Yandex's network were bots, because a search engine reads the web with bots.

What the data does not show: the chart shows automated traffic from Yandex's network, not who sent it or why. Nobody has shown that troll farms or fake accounts ran on these servers.

Why now: in late September, Russian drones hit data centers in Kyiv, and after one attack about 100,000 households lost internet for a while. Zelensky says Ukraine responds in mirror-like fashion. Ukraine's Ministry of Defence has not commented.

When Yandex's servers come back, will the bots come back with them?

Chapters
0:00 Three hits, bots went quiet
0:15 Where: Sasovo, Kaluga, Vladimir
1:02 What the sites look like
1:15 Yandex's own words
1:26 Measured: the network
1:44 Measured: the bots
2:03 The reaction
2:16 What the data does not show
2:32 Why now
2:51 The open question

Sources shown on screen: Cloudflare Radar, NetBlocks, Tom's Hardware, Planet Labs via UNITED24 Media, Militarnyi, Al Jazeera.

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