Many social media accounts of Russian bots and trolls went offline, and Russian online propaganda activity dropped significantly, after Ukraine struck multiple Yandex data centers earlier last week.Ukrainian drone strikes hit three of Yandex’s main Russian data centers over four days in retaliation for Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers.
The first strike, on October 8, targeted the Sasovo facility in the Ryazan region, which housed two of Yandex’s three supercomputers used to train its YandexGPT AI model. It caused a fire and fully suspended operations. On October 9, drones struck Yandex’s largest data center in the Kaluga region, completely disabling several modules. A third strike on October 11 hit the ~50 MW facility in Vladimir (designed for thousands of server racks), fully suspending operations there and disrupting over 80 Yandex Cloud services, including AI tools, databases, storage, and developer platforms.
Yandex (often called “Russia’s Google”) confirmed the damage, service disruptions (including to its AI chatbot and other platforms), and the difficulty of restoring capacity. No company employees were reported injured in the facilities. The strikes disrupted websites and services reliant on Yandex Cloud, including some Russian media outlets, telecom providers, and business platforms.
Data from Cloudflare showed a sharp collapse in bot traffic originating from the Yandex network. Traffic fell to around 57% of recent peaks after the October 8 strike and later dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded over the prior two weeks. NetBlocks monitoring also recorded substantial reductions in traffic for Yandex Cloud and Yandex LLC. Russian state-aligned media and propaganda sites experienced outages in the immediate aftermath.
There has also been a sign significant reduction in Russian-bot propaganda across social media platforms following the strikes including reduced content about fake stories relating to the French presidential elections, pro-MAGA and Trump-content, pro-AFD content and also pro-Palestine content.
These strikes formed part of a widening “data center war.” Russia had intensified attacks on Ukrainian data centers and digital infrastructure since late September 2026 (which it described as a “forced digital detox”), disrupting internet and mobile services for Ukrainians. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the Yandex strikes as a symmetrical response.
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