AI-rewritten: This is a summary of an article from Tom’s Hardware, rewritten by AI (Qwen, running locally) to make it easier to read. The facts come from the original article – read it for the full story.

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Russian bot traffic from Yandex has dropped to just 0.4% after Ukraine struck multiple data centers. Cloudflare reports that the network’s automated requests fell from around 57% on October 8 to this current low level. The initial drop occurred when Ukraine hit a facility in Sasovo, roughly 195 miles southeast of the Kremlin, housing two supercomputers. A second, larger campus in Kaluga, about 220 miles west of Sasovo, was knocked offline yesterday. These attacks appear to be Ukraine’s response to Moscow’s strikes on its own infrastructure, which caused outages for popular piracy sites.

Yandex is Russia’s equivalent to Google, and at least 84 of its cloud services are currently offline according to Yandex Cloud status reports. NetBlocks, a global internet monitoring firm, notes that traffic for Yandex Cloud has dropped to 30% while Yandex LLC saw a drop to 63%. This likely results in slower internet or complete disruption for users. Ordinary Russians cannot easily switch to high-speed satellite internet because Starlink does not operate in Russia, and the competing Rassvet constellation has seen many of its satellites fall back to Earth after launch.

These incidents are part of an ongoing conflict that escalated dramatically in 2022 following Russia’s failed attempt to capture Kyiv, though many observers say the war began in 2014 with the seizure of Crimea and occupation of eastern Ukraine. Drone warfare has evolved from using commercially available drones for reconnaissance and kamikaze attacks to employing long-range systems capable of destroying Tu-95 strategic bombers over 1,500 miles away. While Russia justified recent strikes on civilian data centers by claiming Ukrainian military intelligence used them, similar hits have occurred on AWS sites in Bahrain and the UAE since Washington’s bombing campaign against Iran began.