Ukrainian drones hit Yandex data centers, sparking claims that Russian troll farms went quiet

Russian tech giant Yandex confirmed that drones hit three of its data centers, shutting down the facilities in Sasovo and Vladimir and knocking out part of the infrastructure in Kaluga.

On October 11, Yandex Cloud told its customers that the platform was running in emergency mode and advised them to switch to their own disaster recovery plans, after a drone attack shut down the company’s data center in Vladimir. The facility was the third Yandex data center hit within four days.

“We consider the remaining resource configuration unstable. The platform is operating in emergency mode, and we recommend using any available alternative disaster recovery plans. Communication channels with technical support may be unstable,” the company said in a service alert.

Yandex, often called Russia’s Google, describes its data centers as its “iron heart,” powering services that millions of people use daily and technology that hundreds of thousands of companies rely on to run their businesses.

“We understand that for our users, clients, and partners, every outage means disrupted plans and the inability to do what was part of everyday life or work,” Yandex wrote in a press release.

According to the company, the Sasovo data center in the Ryazan region was seriously damaged in an attack on the night of October 7 to 8 and stopped operating. The Kaluga facility was attacked on the morning of October 9, and the Vladimir data center went offline after an attack on the night of October 11. Yandex said none of its employees were hurt.

Alexander Avdeyev, the governor of the Vladimir region, wrote on Telegram that drones attacked infrastructure on the outskirts of Vladimir, starting a fire and knocking out two substations that supply electricity to 5,000 residents, and that people living closest to the site were being evacuated.

“The Yandex Cloud platform remains operational in a limited mode. Our engineers are continuing recovery efforts,” reads the latest status update.

The company did not disclose whether any customer data stored in the damaged data centers was lost for good.

The strikes were carried out by Ukrainian forces, and after the Sasovo strike, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was responding to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers, adding that “we always respond in mirror-like fashion.”

Sasovo houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI model, Reuters reported .

After the strikes, charts from Cloudflare Radar showing a sharp drop in bot traffic from Yandex’s network spread online, along with numerous claims that the strikes had silenced Russian troll farms.

“Russia’s Yandex data centres were hit, and shared charts show bot traffic from its network plunging,” Tomáš Zdechovský, a Czech Member of the European Parliament, wrote on X. “If Kremlin troll farms were affected too, perhaps real people will finally get more of a voice on social media.”

In a separate post that drew more than 4 million views, Zdechovský shared a chart that purportedly showed online activity around Germany’s right-wing AfD party falling after the strikes. “If confirmed, this is telling,” he wrote. “Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets.”

Even the Ukrainian president made a similar link at the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12, saying social media had become easier to breathe on after the strikes reached Yandex’s data centers.

Ilya Lozovsky, a senior editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), disagreed, writing in a personal post on X that the viral claims about plummeting Russian bot activity “have no basis in fact.”

He explained that the Cloudflare chart shows a decline in automated web traffic from Yandex, which “is a measure of things like search engine requests, not social media bots.” Lozovsky also questioned the AfD chart Zdechovský shared, noting that it was unsourced and contained obvious errors.

“All of this doesn’t prove that nothing happened. What it shows is that there’s no proof that anything happened,” Lozovsky stated.

“It’s certainly possible that nefarious Russian bot activity really has been reduced. Tracking this kind of thing is very difficult, and I hope someone does a detailed and rigorous study soon,” concluded Lozovsky.

In a reply to Lozovsky, Zdechovský’s spokesperson said the MEP had used the words “If confirmed” to make it clear that the connection was not an established fact. The spokesperson added that Zdechovský personally believes there is a connection, but did not say where the chart came from, according to the full reply Lozovsky published.