Yandex outage: Data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots went on the move

What happened

Cloudflare data reveals that while search crawling stopped, malicious bots simply migrated to other networks. When strikes hit Yandex data centers (a building full of computers that runs online services), many assumed Russian bot operations went dark.

Following reported strikes on Yandex data centers, claims circulated on the Internet that Russian bot farms and influence operations had been knocked offline. HTTP traffic charts showed steep drops, fueling speculation that the infrastructure damage had stopped these malicious actors.

However, aggregate traffic metrics can easily mislead. There are two autonomous system numbers ( ASNs ) associated with Yandex: AS13238 is used by Yandex’s search engine, while AS200350 runs its cloud services.