Yandex strikes didn't stop malicious bots—they just moved to other hosts

Yandex outage: data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots moved

After Ukrainian drone strikes knocked Yandex data centers offline in October, internet speculation claimed Russian bot farms were crippled. Cloudflare Radar and Bot Management data show a different reality: while Yandex Search traffic (AS13238) dropped almost entirely due to verified search crawlers, malicious automation on Yandex.Cloud (AS200350) simply migrated to other hosting providers like Radist and Selectel. Identical JA4 fingerprints and request patterns appeared elsewhere, and Russian bot traffic targeting gambling accounts stayed flat. The outage disrupted search indexing, not the bots.