Yandex's bot traffic on Cloudflare's network fell by roughly 99% after an attack on one of its data centers.
The drop shows up in Cloudflare Radar's bot traffic tracker for AS13238, the autonomous system number tied to Yandex, over a seven-day window. A Hacker News discussion flagged the chart, pointing to an attack on a Yandex data center as the cause. Neither the original post nor the Radar page spells out what kind of attack hit the facility, and there's no statement from Yandex included in the source. What's measurable is the result: a crawler that normally shows up as a steady, heavy presence in Cloudflare's bot data essentially stopped showing up at all.
A 99% collapse in one search engine's crawl traffic says more about infrastructure concentration than about Yandex specifically. Most "bot traffic" on the web isn't thousands of independent actors - it's a short list of large crawlers from Google, Bing, Yandex, and a handful of AI scrapers, each running out of a limited number of facilities. Knock out the wrong data center and a huge slice of a company's automated footprint vanishes overnight.
That single point of failure, not the attack itself, is the part worth remembering here - the open question is how long it takes Yandex to claw that traffic back, and the source doesn't say.