Yandex, the company known as “Russia’s Google,” has been forced to shut down its operations at a third data center near Moscow after attacks by Ukraine’s drones over the past few days have caused extensive damage.
“The data center has shut down completely, and the remaining infrastructure is unstable. The platform is operating in emergency mode,” Yandex said in a statement.
Yandex maintains six data centers, three of which have been struck in retaliation for Russia’s, reducing cloud services, payments, deliveries and other online services across the country.
On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that social media sites had become less hostile following the attacks, as web users noted plummeting bot activity online.
Social media users in the United States as well as Europe had noticed a difference.
According to an analysis of Cloudflare Radar data, automated traffic originating from Yandex’s network fell by approximately 94% on Sunday compared with its average levels in the second half of September.
However, the figures also include legitimate automated traffic, such as search-engine crawlers, and do not establish whether Kremlin-linked social media bots were affected.
Is it true that Ukrainian drone attacks have knocked out Russian bot activity online? It’s complicated, but declining bot activity has been definitely noticeable.
In Europe, claims of a sharp decline in online activity surrounding the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) circulated widely following the attacks, although no independently verified figures have emerged.