Yandex Bot Traffic Plummets After Airstrikes Knock Data Centers Offline
Sudden drop in Cloudflare bot traffic after strike on Yandex datacenter
Following three strikes on Yandex data centers, Cloudflare Radar shows HTTP traffic from Yandex's ASN dropping to nearly zero. The outages have disrupted Yandex Go, Pay, food delivery, and cloud services across Russia and neighboring countries. Hacker News commenters debate whether the drop reflects Yandex's search crawler going dark or a broader collapse of its bot infrastructure, and what it means for the wider internet.
Because three of its primary facilities were knocked offline within four days, Yandex's failover mechanisms broke down.
- londons_explore
Yandex is Russian Google.
Of course they have bots... That's how you index the web.
If we took Google offline I bet there would also be a reduction in bot traffic from them too!
Indexing is also probably a low priority task, so if half their datacenter capacity is taken offline, their bot traffic probably reduces by more than 50%.
- throwaw12
Someone needs to learn how to read the Bot Traffic page.
That is a drop in traffic specifically from Yandex bots (which includes their crawlers and other apps hosted in their DC)
Now compare it with Bot Traffic in:
* Russia: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d
* Europe: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/europe?dateRange=7d
* Worldwide: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d
Dip is barely noticeable even in Russia.
Its like saying, "API requests are completely down" (and small disclaimer: only from your server, because your server is down)
- timr
Isn't this showing the percentage of bot traffic from the Yandex IP range?
If so, it isn't particularly surprising that the line would go down.
EDIT: yes, it is. Looking at the same graph for all of Russia, and there's no discernible pattern:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d
same for the 48h view:
- schleck8
The HTTP traffic from Yandex is down to ~ 0 % after the third strike, after the first two strikes already degraded it. I wonder how this looks like at the network level because their search page still serves, but presumably their crawler is inactive now
Edit: Here is some more info, they do have availability issues as is to be expected
> Because three of its primary facilities were knocked offline within four days, Yandex’s failover mechanisms broke down[1][8].
> Outages have cascaded across Yandex Go (taxis), Yandex Pay, food delivery, smart home platforms, internal logistics, and third-party corporate services hosted on Yandex Cloud[2][7]. Problems have spilled into neighboring countries using these systems (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Serbia)[2][7].
Edit 2: Here is the Yandex Cloud status page, their GCP/AWS equivalent. The entire compute core is offline, and even worse, Cloud Backup
https://status.yandex.cloud/ru/dashboard
> ru Compute Cloud, ru Kubernetes, ru PostgreSQL, ru ClickHouse, ru MySQL, ru YDB, ru Kafka, ru Application Load Balancer
Interestingly, Yandex tells its users on the status page to switch to competitors Selectel, K2Cloud, and VK Cloud. Which will probably be hit next
- f311a
I can’t believe there are so many dumb comments in this thread.
All it shows is that crawling from Yandex search engine stopped from one Yandex data center ASN.
No one runs opinion/malicious bots from data center IPs that people mention here.
Did people actually stop thinking?
- r721
*Sudden drop in Cloudflare bot traffic from AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC
UPD Definition of bot traffic from Cloudflare's glossary:
>Bot vs. human traffic
>The percentage of HTTP requests classified as bot versus human, based on bot scores. Requests with a bot score between 1 and 29 are classified as likely automated (bot), while requests with a score of 30 or above are classified as likely human. For more information, refer to Bot classes.
>By default, Radar shows bot vs. human traffic for requests to HTML content. This filter is meant to represent traditional web traffic by excluding API calls, asset requests (images, scripts, fonts), and other machine-to-machine requests.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/radar/glossary/#bot-vs-hum...
- pluc
That's some intense mitigation from Cloudflare
- LiamPowell
Everyone is mentioning crawlers, but wouldn't most traffic from a datacenter's ASN usually be bots just in general given that there's not many humans there to generate human traffic?