Yandex Bot Traffic Drops 99% After DC Attack
Original: Yandex bot traffic down 99% after data center attack
Why This Matters
Yandex's crawler outage could degrade search freshness for millions of users.
Cloudflare Radar data shows Yandex bot traffic fell 99% over a 7-day window following a reported attack on Yandex data center infrastructure, sharply disrupting its web crawling operations.
Cloudflare Radar's autonomous system data for AS13238 — the network block associated with Yandex — shows a near-total collapse in bot traffic over a recent 7-day period. The drop coincides with reports of a physical or cyber attack on Yandex data center infrastructure, which appears to have knocked its web crawlers largely offline. Yandex operates one of the world's largest search indexes outside of Google, and its bots are responsible for crawling and indexing vast portions of the web, particularly across Russian-language and Eastern European domains. A 99% reduction in bot activity signals severe disruption to that infrastructure. Cloudflare Radar tracks bot versus human traffic ratios per autonomous system, making it a reliable signal for detecting large-scale outages or operational changes in crawler behavior. No official statement from Yandex was available at time of publication.