Cloudflare data: Yandex outage didn't kill malicious bots, they just moved to other Russian hosts
Cloudflare Blog · rss · 2026-10-15
Background
Between Oct 7–11, reported Ukrainian drone strikes hit three Yandex facilities in Russia, collapsing Yandex Search (AS13238) traffic to 99% below baseline and Yandex.Cloud (AS200350) to 90% below. Speculation spread that Russian bot farms had been knocked offline; Cloudflare's Radar and Bot Management data tell a different story.
Key findings
- Yandex Search (AS13238): 99.5% of requests were automated and 93.6% verified crawlers — the traffic drop was almost entirely YandexBot crawling less. Publishing/newspaper sites were hit hardest (-44% of Yandex traffic).
- Yandex.Cloud (AS200350): 95% of scored requests were bots, none verified. Attack-like activity plunged (WordPress probing -90%, scanner requests -93%), but high-volume automation didn't vanish.
- Malicious traffic migrated: bot traffic to one gambling customer account dropped to zero from Yandex.Cloud, while identical requests — same JA4 TLS fingerprint, request paths, headers, and User-Agent — reappeared from other Russian hosting ASNs including Radist and Selectel.
- Minimal global impact: global bot share stayed at 39.4% (±0.2%) throughout; Russia-origin bot share fell from 50.4% to 42%.
Takeaway
Aggregate traffic metrics mislead: an outage confirms the network went down, not that malicious bots were disrupted — and traffic originating from a provider doesn't imply responsibility. Datacenter strikes had little lasting effect on malicious automation.
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