Ukraine Knocked Out Three Yandex Data Centers. Russian Taxi Drivers Were Told to Use Google Maps.

Imagine Google going offline. Not just search, but Maps, Gmail, Google Pay, Waymo, the cloud servers half your favorite apps run on, and Uber Eats for good measure. That is roughly what happened to millions of Russians over the weekend, after drones hit three data centers belonging to Yandex, the company everyone calls “Russia’s Google.”

The first strike landed on October 8. By Sunday, October 11, three facilities had been hit, dozens of services were down, and Yandex was sending its own taxi drivers a notification advising them to switch to Google Maps or Waze while it fixed its servers. Meanwhile, people on X were running “bot tests” and celebrating what looked like the sudden disappearance of Russian troll accounts.

The outages are real. The bot story is more complicated.

Three strikes in four days

Yandex confirmed on October 9 that two of its data centers had been struck. The first was in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region southeast of Moscow, where the company said operations were “completely halted.” According to Tom’s Hardware, Sasovo houses two of Yandex’s three supercomputers, the machines it uses to train its YandexGPT models. The company has not said whether they were damaged.

The second was in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow, which UNILAD Tech describes as Yandex’s largest data center. Yandex said part of the infrastructure there was “disabled” and that “several data center modules have been completely disabled.” Ukrainian defense company Fire Point said its FP-1 one way attack drones were involved in the Kaluga strike.

The third, on October 11, hit a facility in the suburbs of Vladimir, east of Moscow, which Yandex said was taken completely offline. Kyiv Post reported that the 50 megawatt site supported more than 80 digital platforms, AI tools and Yandex Cloud services. About 1,600 customers in the Vladimir region also lost electricity, according to the regional head.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky linked the strikes to Russia’s own campaign. “We continue to respond to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, and we’re doing so with high precision,” he wrote on X. “Another data center was hit as well, our symmetrical response.” Last month, Russia struck data centers in the Kyiv region, causing temporary internet outages for roughly 100,000 households. Moscow claimed those facilities were used by Ukrainian military intelligence.

It is a new front in a war that has already been reshaped by drones, from cheap quadcopters on the front line to long-range aircraft that fly well over a thousand miles. Militaries everywhere are watching. In the US, the Pentagon is cutting 20% of its generals to build a dedicated drone command.

What actually stopped working

Yandex is not one service. It is search, maps, email, payments, music, a ride hailing and food delivery app that combines what Uber and DoorDash do in the US, and a cloud platform that, according to its own website, has more than 64,000 customers. When a data center goes down, it takes some of those other companies’ apps with it.

Tom’s Hardware reported that Yandex Cloud’s status page listed at least 84 services offline at one point. Internet monitor NetBlocks measured Yandex Cloud traffic at just 30% of normal levels and Yandex LLC at 63%.

Russian media also reported problems with dating apps, real estate sites, a self-publishing platform and even the website of football club Spartak Moscow. The outages spilled across borders too. The Times of Central Asia reported that users in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan struggled to reach Yandex apps, and in Yerevan, Armenia, people switched to a local taxi app that then buckled under the sudden demand.

Payments were the most nerve-racking part for ordinary users. When Yandex Pay went down, the head of the company’s fintech division, Dima Pirogov, posted a statement to calm people down. “All your money is safe,” he said. “The money itself isn’t stored in the data center. That’s where the servers that power our services are located.” He added: “We can’t yet give you a precise timeline for restoration, but we promise: we won’t stop until the service is restored.”

Did Russia’s bots really go quiet?

This is the part that went viral. After the strikes, people on X began posting opinions that would normally attract swarms of pro-Kremlin replies and reported that the replies had mostly stopped. Zelensky picked up on it at the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12, saying “everyone noticed” a drop in Russian bot activity.

The data behind the claim comes from Cloudflare Radar, which tracks traffic from individual networks. According to an analysis cited by United24 Media, automated HTTP requests from Yandex’s network, known as AS13238, fell to 0.3% of the chart’s peak at 02:00 UTC on October 11. At the same hour a week earlier, the figure was 88.2%. German tech outlet t3n reported that it recovered to around 20% by the evening of October 11.

The problem is what “automated” means. Cloudflare classified 99.6% of requests from the Yandex network as automated even before the strikes. That is not because Yandex is a troll farm. It is because Yandex runs one of the world’s biggest search engines, and search engines work by sending crawlers to read every website on the internet. YandexBot, monitoring tools, AI scrapers and app back ends all count as bots in that chart. When the data centers running them go dark, the bot line drops to almost nothing, whether or not a single propaganda account was affected.

Influence operations also tend not to run their sock puppet accounts from servers that are clearly labeled as belonging to Russia’s biggest tech company. As United24 Media put it, the measurements “cannot establish whether Russian propaganda bots disappeared or whether damaged infrastructure stopped generating ordinary automated traffic.” The quieter replies on X may be real, or they may be confirmation bias from people who badly want them to be. The Cloudflare chart alone cannot tell you which.

Why this matters beyond Russia

Data centers used to be thought of as boring buildings full of servers. This week showed that they are now strategic targets, in the same category as refineries and power stations. Russia’s Digital Development Minister, Maksut Shadayev, told a State Duma committee on Monday that his office was working with the Defense Ministry on measures to protect data centers.

There is an irony here. Russia has spent years pushing its “sovereign internet” rules and forcing companies to keep Russian data on Russian soil, partly to reduce its dependence on Western tech. If you want the background, we explained what Russia’s sovereign internet law actually prohibits. Concentrating so much of the country’s digital life in a handful of domestic facilities also concentrates the risk. When three buildings go down, taxi drivers end up on Google Maps.

For everyone else, the lesson is about redundancy. Most countries rely on a small number of cloud providers, and most cloud providers rely on a small number of very large campuses. The Yandex outage is an extreme example, caused by a war rather than a bad software update, but the cascading effects looked a lot like any major cloud failure: one provider stumbles and hundreds of unrelated apps go with it.

Sources and further reading

• UNILAD Tech: Impact Ukraine’s attack on Russian data center has had on the global internet
• The Moscow Times: Ukraine’s strikes on Yandex data centers, explained
• Tom’s Hardware: Russia’s Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight
• United24 Media: Ukraine struck Yandex data centers, Russian bots went silent, now questions are mounting
• CNBC: Russia’s Yandex halts operations at data center after drone strike
• Kyiv Post: Drone strike hits Yandex data center in Vladimir

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