Bot traffic from Yandex
Cloudflare telemetry shows bot traffic from Yandex’s networks collapsing after multiple Ukrainian strikes on the company’s data centers, sparking debate over whether the drop mainly reflects lost search crawler activity or disruption to broader bot and command‑and‑control infrastructure. Commenters tie the incident to the changing nature of war, where cheap drones can cripple civilian cloud platforms that underpin taxis, payments, and logistics across several countries. The thread also highlights how much automated traffic originates from major cloud providers worldwide and what this means for high‑availability planning, sanctions, and the ethics of tech firms serving military or authoritarian clients.
What the Cloudflare Bot Chart Actually Shows
- Graph tracks Cloudflare-classified “bot vs human” HTTP traffic from a specific Yandex ASN (and a second Yandex ASN also shows a collapse), not global bot activity.
- “Bot” here includes legitimate crawlers and automated traffic to HTML endpoints, not just malicious scanners.
- Overall bot share for Russia and worldwide barely moves; the dramatic change is specific to Yandex networks.
- Some point out that most traffic from data center ASNs is expected to be “bot” by definition.
Impact of Strikes on Yandex Infrastructure
- Multiple Yandex data centers were reportedly hit within days, causing cascading outages across Yandex Go/taxi, payments, food delivery, smart home, internal logistics, and Yandex Cloud services in Russia and neighboring countries.
- Yandex Cloud status pages show major Russian-region services (compute, Kubernetes, managed DBs, Kafka, backups) offline; Kazakh regions remain up but are not sized for full Russian load.
- Yandex is explicitly telling customers to migrate to competitors’ clouds, suggesting severe and prolonged impact.
- Commenters frame this as a high-profile case study in catastrophic failure and broken failover mechanisms.
Bots, Propaganda, and “Cleaning Up the Internet”
- Some hope reduced Yandex bot traffic might noticeably reduce disinformation or spam; others argue the chart mainly reflects search crawling and generic automation, not “troll farms.”
- There is discussion that command-and-control often runs in data centers while using residential IPs as exits, so any effect on information ops would be indirect and unclear.
- One commenter notes local social media in Poland seems quieter on certain pro-Russian narratives, but this is anecdotal.
War, Datacenters, and Ethics
- Broad debate on whether data centers are “valid military targets,” with arguments about dual-use infrastructure, total war doctrine, and legal war-crime constraints.
- Some see this as part of a wider shift: cheap drones enabling precise strikes on economic and information infrastructure (refineries, warehouses, clouds).
- Others emphasize corporate and personal ethics: whether companies like Yandex should refuse collaboration with aggressive states, versus the real risks of doing so under authoritarian regimes.
Resilience and DR Lessons
- Many highlight the need to plan for region-wide or multi-AZ loss (war, terrorism, natural disasters), multi-country deployments, offsite backups, and “net-split” scenarios.
- Suggestions include hardened physical design against drone attacks and, speculatively, future private air-defense capabilities for critical data centers.