Yandex outage: data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots went on the move

Reported strikes on Yandex facilities between October 7 and 11 caused major traffic declines in both Yandex Search (AS13238) and Yandex.Cloud (AS200350), but Cloudflare analysis found that the effects on automation differed significantly and did not substantiate claims that Russian bot farms or social media influence operations had been crippled. Most traffic lost from the search ASN consisted of verified Yandex crawlers indexing pages, images, and news content, resulting primarily in reduced search indexing. Yandex.Cloud experienced declines in vulnerability scanning, WordPress probing, and other attack-like requests, but high-volume automated activity rapidly shifted to alternative Russian hosting providers, with identical technical fingerprints observed across networks. Although Russia-origin bot traffic fell during the outages, global bot traffic remained broadly stable, and analysis of social-media-related traffic found no unusual disruption. The findings emphasize that aggregate network traffic or an originating ASN cannot reliably identify malicious actors or determine whether automated threats have stopped, because cloud-hosted workloads can be moved quickly; assessing such activity instead requires examining request behavior, fingerprints, rates, and targeted endpoints.

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