Ukraine Has Allegedly Solved The Internet's Bot Problem With A Few Well-Placed Drone Strikes On Russian Data Centers and Bot Farms
Yahoo News- Ukraine has launched a series of drone strikes over the past week that have knocked multiple Russian data centers offline, resulting in internet bot traffic from the country dropping to almost zero.
The data centers were operated by Yandex - Russia's domestic answer to Google - and traffic for the search engine has dropped to just 0.4% of its two week high.
Yandex traffic first dropped on October 8, 2026 after Ukraine struck a data center in Sasovo, Russia, and a second strike on a data center 220 miles to the west of Sasovo on October 10.
Ukraine's strikes on data centers appear to be retaliatory. Russia began striking Ukrainian data centers in late September under the reasoning that they were being used by Ukrainian military intelligence. A strike on a building within the business center of Kyiv killed four people and knocked internet connectivity offline for 100,000 households in the Kyiv region.
As military intelligence and warfighting capabilities become increasingly digital, data centers have become a key part of war.
At the outbreak of hostilities between Iran and the US and Israel, numerous AWS data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates were struck by missiles knocking numerous services offline in the region.
Ukraine has been bombing Russian data centers over the past week, including several operated by Yandex, which is basically Russia's version of Google. And according to reports, automated internet traffic coming from Yandex's network dropped off a cliff. Hate to see it.
99.6% effectively gone. Ukraine skipped knocking out or disrupting their wifi, and went straight to blowing up the fucking buildings. And no, naturally, people have started celebrating the idea that Russia's infamous army of internet trolls and propaganda bots had finally been wiped off the face of the internet. Imagine opening up Twitter and finding actual human beings arguing with each other for once. What a crazy concept.
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Unfortunately, the computer nerds showed up to ruin everybody's fun and explain that most of the traffic in question was probably just automated web crawlers and search-engine bots, not necessarily the Kremlin's professional shit-stirrers.
Fine. Whatever. Thanks for the clarification assholes.
Personally, I can't tell the difference. Twitter is the most insidious place on the internet, outside of reddit. Just the most miserable, cold-hearted "people/bots" on the planet. I know Elon claims he's helped reign in the problem since taking over, but it just feels like it gets nastier by the day.
Either way, you gotta at least appreciate how crazy a time we're living in. We're at the point in modern warfare where countries are literally bombing each other's Google servers. Imagine being the poor IT guy at Yandex, getting a call from your boss asking why the website is down, and having to explain that Ukraine blew up the whole fucking data center.
"Have you submitted a support ticket?"