Ukraine's Yandex data-center strikes expose Russia's digital fragility
Three Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex facilities within days have knocked out Russian banking, search, and cloud services, prompting pro-Kremlin bloggers to warn of a looming collapse.
Part of a larger narrative
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- Ukraine's Yandex data-center strikes expose Russia's digital fragilityyou are here
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What to know
- Three Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex facilities within days (Oct 8, 9, 11) damaged supercomputers used for YandexGPT and knocked out one of Russia's largest data centers.
- Outages have hit Russian payment apps, banking, e-commerce, streaming, ride-hailing, and navigation services, plus cloud customers including major grocery and retail chains.
- Pro-Kremlin military bloggers themselves are warning that Russia's centralized digital economy is unprepared for continued Ukrainian retaliation.
- Extent of physical damage to Yandex's three supercomputers (Chervonenkis, Lyapunov, Galushkin) remains unclear.
Ukraine's retaliatory strikes on Russian tech infrastructure are deserved and welcome.
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“go for them, zelensky”
glynmoody.bsky.social · Bluesky ↗
This episode shows data centers are a dangerously fragile, high-value target in modern armed conflict.
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“We leaned just how easy data centers were to attack in the early days of the Iran war. Now Ukraine really pushing attacks on Russian data centers. "Data is the new oil" but for armed conflict.”
@robcyran · Bluesky ↗
Volodymyr Zelenskyy President of UkraineChrisO_wiki Pseudonymous independent researcherRatio Militaris Pro-Kremlin Russian milbloggerYandex Russian tech giant, 'Russia's Google'
How it unfolded 5 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesvideospostscomments
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Online commenters react with schadenfreude to Russia's outages
As the Ars Technica report circulated on Bluesky, Mastodon, X, and Slashdot, commenters expressed approval of Ukraine's retaliatory strikes on Russia's centralized tech infrastructure.
“go for them, zelensky…”
— glynmoody.bsky.social -
No, a Yandex cloud malfunction did not take down disinformation/troll bots. It's a dangerous misconception. This is not how it works, not even technically. After Ukrainian drones hit Yandex data centers, a viral chart showed Russian "bot traffic" collapsing. But those bots are
2 more of the top 3 · 76 posts in this stretch
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RE: https:// hachyderm.io/@evacide/11743496 3703286230 The Yandex decrease in threat activity narrative was a nonsense peddled by the Ukrainian government. People confuse legit search engine bots with social media bots. Russian propaganda operations don’t run from Yandex. They never have. I deal with them all the time on Mastodon. There was no…
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"Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the “data center war” it started" - arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026... go for them, zelensky
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Ars Technica details cascading outages across Russian digital services
Reporting confirms the three strikes caused interruptions to Russian payment apps, digital banking, email, e-commerce, streaming, ride-hailing, food delivery, and navigation services, with Yandex's search engine holding roughly 70 percent market share in Russia and its cloud arm serving major retail chains.
“symmetrical response…”
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy -
I'm sorry to burst everyone's bubble, but as of now, there is no solid evidence that Russian bot farms have become inactive due to the Yandex data centre strikes. The Cloudflare charts mostly show activity related to web crawlers, which have little to do with automated posting
2 more of the top 3 · 7 posts in this stretch
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"It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media", says @theverge.com
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With reports showing massive drops in automated social media manipulation following physical targeted strikes on Russian server hubs, the link between foreign IT infrastructure and Western election disruption is undeniable. Securing democratic resilience demands action. # FBPE https://www. euronews.com/2026/10/12/did-uk…
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Third strike forces Yandex to suspend Vladimir facility
A third Ukrainian drone strike hit a Yandex data center in Vladimir east of Moscow, forcing the company to suspend operations there; the facility housed the third of Yandex's three AI supercomputers.
“We leaned just how easy data centers were to attack in the early days of the Iran war. Now Ukraine really pushing attacks on Russian data centers. "Data is the new oil" but for armed conflict.”
— @robcyran, Bluesky user · source -
Russian bot traffic has dropped to nearly 0 after Ukraine struck a Yandex data center in Vladimir, Russia
2 more of the top 3 · 14 posts in this stretch
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PSA: No, Russian bot traffic has not significantly decreased. Only Yandex’s network is mostly silent, which doesn’t have a huge impact on automated requests from all of Russia. And neither has much to do with social media bots. Stop spreading this kind of misinformation. https:// radar.
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We leaned just how easy data centers were to attack in the early days of the Iran war. Now Ukraine really pushing attacks on Russian data centers. “Data is the new oil” but for armed conflict.
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- 1 day quiet
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Second strike hits large Kaluga data center as warnings go viral
A Ukrainian strike knocked out a Yandex data center in Kaluga, one of Russia's largest with 63-megawatt capacity; the same day, researcher ChrisO_wiki's translation of a Russian warblogger forecasting a 'disastrous collapse' of Russia's digital economy spread widely on X and Bluesky.
“Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres have started a "data centre war" for which Russia is ill-prepared, argues a Russian warblogger. He forecasts a disastrous collapse of Russia's digital economy if Ukraine's retaliatory attacks on Russian data centres continue.”
— @ChrisO_wiki -
first by ZeroHedge, 1d ago
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first by Euronews.com, 1d ago
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1/ Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centres have started a "data centre war" for which Russia is ill-prepared, argues a Russian warblogger. He forecasts a disastrous collapse of Russia's digital economy if Ukraine's retaliatory attacks on Russian data centres continue. ⬇️
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Ukraine strikes Yandex data center in Sasovo
A Ukrainian drone attack damaged a Yandex data center in the Sasovo region southeast of Moscow, which houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to train its YandexGPT AI model.
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4 outlets first by Mastodon, 1d ago · also Mashable, Gizmodo, Kyiv Independent · read ↗
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first by Mastodon, 1d ago · also Ars Technica
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background
Russia launches drone campaign on Ukrainian data centers — Russia began striking Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September, temporarily cutting internet and cell service for up to 100,000 households in Kyiv as part of a wider long-range strike campaign on power grid, transport, and residential infrastructure.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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first by Mastodon, 13h ago · also Mother Jones, The Verge
1 more headline
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first by Mastodon, 16h ago · also France 24 EN, Guardian Media
1 more headline
- Have Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centres hit Russian online disinformation? France 24 EN · 10h ago
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first by Mastodon, 2m ago · also BBC
and 5 smaller pieces
What people are saying 16 voices from 4 sites · best of 99 · verbatim
- Yesterday
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"These measurements show a sharp reduction in automated network activity, but cannot establish whether Russian propaganda bots disappeared or whether damaged infrastructure stopped generating ordinary automated traffic." Yeah, real eye opening.
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Rusland burde have indset, at landets datacenterkrig mod Ukraine ville blive gengældt og ramme Rusland selv hårdere.Datatrafik i Rusland er stærkt centraliseret og derfor mere sårbar end i Ukraine, som har decentraliseret og placeret vigtig dataaktivitet i udlandet
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🔥 One more Ukrainian strike on a Yandex data center and “russia’s Google” ceases to exist as a company. Some data may be permanently lost.🧵
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RE: https:// hachyderm.io/@evacide/11743496 3703286230 It's unsurprising when people still use the term "bots" interchangeably for anything between search engine crawlers, automated accounts like the ones that post the weather every hour, automated accounts that pretend to be real people, real people who are paid to pretend to be other people, and…
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While many of us want to believe that Ukraine's strikes on Yandex have drastically reduced Russian disinformation, apparently it isn't so. @ rysiek is quoted! https://www. theguardian.com/world/2026/oct /13/ukrainian-strikes-russian-datacentres-online-disinformation-bots
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A lot of people I know shared posts about the Yandex datacenter bombing resulting in a decrease in Russian misinformation/disinformation bot activity, sometimes with charts. Let this be a reminder every one of us could be fooled by a story that we really want to be true.
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I'm not sure exactly what you did TBH. I just assumed you had something set up to do it, and thought you should share it if you did. I could probably figure it out, but not everyone could, and many who could are either too busy or too lazy.
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It's a mixture of things. Engagement numbers on right wing accounts dropped 70-90% in some cases. Lots of threads where usually there is a flood of anti-West comments instantly had no such activity suddenly. At first critics claimed it was just a weekend effect, but now it's Tuesday and it's still the same, so that argument is essentially…
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This whole thread is left wing disinformation against the right wing. There's zero evidence for these claims. There have been no blackout or evidence of less disinformation bot activity anywhere. Those bots don't even run on regular cloud software like what's in those yandex datacenters.
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Some accounts in here are trying real hard to "disprove" this story (libraryaddict and Eyebrows360) so for clarity I thought I'd add info from two other comments that counters their argument. First of libraryaddict says the blackout didn't happen to which someone replied: So the follow-up comment clarified that the referenced 8-hour blackout…
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This should be eye opening for everyone using X or such platforms. Also for governments. Stop communicating on it when they are used to push a far-right agenda with the consent of their owners.
- Oct 12
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Gee Wilikers, it's a shame I won't get to read the online takes of 'TrumpSuperPatriotWarEagle87622134' anytime soon...
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#Russia was not ready for the #datacenter war it started with #Ukraine
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Ukraine should continue to do this because it will help with keeping many Russian bots from influencing US elections. "On X, Reddit, and elsewhere, users in several Western countries reported seeing less right-wing activity in their feeds, from pro-GOP accounts in the U.S. to supporters of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party."…
- Oct 11
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In Germany, Ukraine, and the United States alike, strikes on Yandex data centers coincided with a sharp decline in bot traffic. And it's not just ordinary users noticing this — researchers are already reporting their initial findings. Similar patterns were observed with Iranian
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To those implying that Kremlin-controlled social media bot/troll farms became silent after Ukraine hit a Yandex data center, posting this CloudFare chart (https://t.co/yMPllx3TnM): Hate to disappoint you all ⤵️