Ukraine has knocked out most of Russia's biggest cloud provider with a string of drone strikes on its data centers.
Cloudflare's traffic data shows bot activity from Yandex's network has collapsed to just 0.4% of its two-week peak, after an initial 57% drop following the first hit. That first strike landed Oct. 8 on a Yandex campus in Sasovo that housed two supercomputers. A second, larger campus in Kaluga went dark the next day, and a third attack hit facilities in Vladimir overnight. Yandex's own status page lists more than 84 services offline, while monitoring firm NetBlocks puts Yandex Cloud traffic at 30% of normal and Yandex LLC's broader network at 63%.
This isn't just an inconvenience for a tech company - Yandex is effectively Russia's Google, running search, cloud and maps for much of the country. Ordinary Russians have no real backup: Starlink doesn't operate inside Russia, and the homegrown Rassvet satellite constellation meant to rival it has had multiple satellites fail to stay in orbit after launch. Ukraine says the strikes are retaliation for Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers, which also knocked some popular piracy sites offline.
The bigger story is what now counts as a legitimate target. Russia argues the Yandex sites doubled as infrastructure for Ukrainian military intelligence - the same justification already used for hitting civilian infrastructure elsewhere. It echoes a pattern playing out far from this war: AWS data centers in Bahrain and the UAE have taken multiple hits since the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran began, with Amazon telling customers to relocate workloads and offering no recovery timeline. Data centers, once treated as back-office plumbing, are becoming front-line targets - and the companies running them have no real playbook for defending against drones.