Russian Tech Giant Yandex’s Connectivity “Collapses” As Kiev Targets Data Centers

Data from the internet monitoring group NetBlocks show a sharp collapse in connectivity across Russian tech giant Yandex’s networks following Ukrainian drone strikes on its data centers.

Confirmed: Metrics show a second collapse in the networks of Russian tech giant Yandex after a new Ukrainian drone attack on data centers in Vladimir this morning. The campaign comes not long after Russia’s threat to give Ukraine a “digital detox.” https://t.co/jOVL5BjYNR

— NetBlocks (@netblocks) October 11, 2026

Separately, internet infrastructure company Cloudflare reports a collapse in bot traffic originating from Yandex’s network, raising questions about whether the disruption affected bot farms used for information operations. Others have pointed out that the decline may reflect reduced activity by Yandex’s web crawlers.

Traffic initially tumbled to about 57% of its peak last Thursday, coinciding with a Ukrainian drone strike on Yandex’s Sasovo facility, which housed two supercomputers. A separate drone attack knocked a much larger data center in Kaluga offline, while Bloomberg reported a third strike on another Yandex data center.

The Moscow Times reports that Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev is working to protect Yandex’s data centers following Ukrainian drone strikes on three of its facilities.

Shadayev told a parliamentary committee earlier on Monday that he had spoken with the Defense Ministry about how to secure Yandex’s data centers. He described the attacks as “unprecedented.”

Industry insiders told Russian business daily Kommersant that fixing damaged server equipment could take up to six months. Shadayev said backup systems and computing capacity elsewhere helped keep operations running.

With bot traffic from Yandex’s network curtailed, X users are reporting that traffic on some Reddit subs has cratered…

Reddit data show a massive decline in activity on some subs since the attack on Russian data centres. The Irish politics sub was down as much as 80% from one center. https://t.co/ahwbQyU8gs

— The Irish Politics Newsletter (@IrishPoliticsNL) October 12, 2026

The topic of the day has been the strikes on Yandex data centers and whether they affect the Russian bot/troll army. There have been some initial research done on this, and the most interesting finding comes from Reddit: after the strikes, many US-related subreddits lost a lot of traffic. Same happened in German and Irish subreddits. As most of you know, Reddit is one of the most popular sources of information for LLMs, and I have zero doubt that Russians are actively trying to steer conversations across the platform to favor their narratives. Full analysis and methodology here: https://t.co/8iQXbpck4F

— Vatnik Soup (@P_Kallioniemi) October 12, 2026

At least the Ukrainians focused on data centers this time, instead of continuing the refinery attacks the US has asked Kiev to stop because of the worsening global refining crisis.