The aftermath of drone strikes on Russia’s data centers

Satellite imagery from 11 October shows burn marks on the western side of the building’s roof in Sasovo. Overnight from 7 to 8 October, the data center of Russia’s most popular web technology company Yandex was hit by a Ukrainian drone. It was one of multiple strikes supposedly targeting the country’s digital infrastructure. The destruction of at least three data centers has triggered a widespread reaction on social media and in the press.

It has been widely reported that the attacks have led to a sharp decline in Russian bot traffic. Cloudflare data confirms a drop of up to 99.6 per cent in automated traffic from Yandex’s network at the lowest point recorded. At the same time, it is not possible to say whether the attacks have also led to a decline in automated Russian disinformation. Most of these likely were search engine crawlers and other harmless automated requests, as Cybernews reports.

Experts consulted by BBC Verify found no evidence that the strikes have reduced Kremlin-linked bot networks significantly. Cloudflare itself clarified that its figures cover all automated requests to websites on its network, including crawlers that index pages for search engines, and that the drop does not necessarily reflect bot behaviour on social media platforms. According to the independent internet analyst Mikhail Klimarev, Yandex uses bots to crawl the entire internet roughly once a day. The company most likely switched them off after its computing capacity was severely degraded.

We specifically looked further into the struck facility in Sasovo, in Russia’s Ryazan region. The affected company, Yandex, had images of its facility from 2021 already blurred. The complex also housed the Sasta machine tool plant, which reportedly supplies the Russian military.

High-resolution imagery provided by Planet Labs shows the facility unblurred in August 2026:

More recent imagery shows the site briefly before the attack:

And right after, with scorched marks on the roof of the data center:

On the day of the strike, the Russian Telegram channel “supernova_plus” published two videos of the location. Vertical52 has analysed and verified both videos. They show the burning data center and guards preventing access to the site:

The video shows the dark blue building structure that houses servers of Yandex and parts of the Sasta machine tool plant that is said to provide tools and other materials to the Russian military. While Yandex houses a confirmed active data center at the location in Sasovo, recent information on the Sasta plant is not yet available at the time of publishing.

A video from another angle shows how guards close off the property as smoke from the building rises into the sky.

In the days after the strikes on multiple data centers in Russia, a debate about the aftermath arose on social media and in the news. Various outlets reported a plunge in social media engagement with far-right parties in Europe, like Reform UK and the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. Vertical52 could not independently verify these claims, and experts consulted by BBC Verify found no evidence for them.

Much of this debate goes back to a post on X by the Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský, viewed more than four million times, which linked the strikes to a sudden drop in online activity around the AfD. He later said he had not presented it as fact. Researchers at dTeam, a US-based group that tracks Moscow-linked influence operations, told BBC Verify they had seen no traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform. Bots tied to the pro-Kremlin operations Storm-1516 and Matryoshka were still active on social media on Tuesday. President Zelensky, who had said there were fewer bots and less hate online, was referring to the atmosphere on social media rather than to measured bot activity, his office told BBC Verify.

What was destroyed in the data center strikes?

On Sunday, 11 October, Yandex announced the complete shutdown of its data center in Russia’s Vladimir region. Two days later, the Kremlin was discussing the impacts of drone attacks on Yandex data centers, as Reuters reports.

Ukraine has struck three of Yandex’s five data centers since 8 October, in response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian internet hubs. According to Isik Mater, director of research at the monitoring group NetBlocks, the disruption affects users worldwide: websites that rely on Yandex may be partly or entirely unusable, and an entire zone remaining out of service points to a significant infrastructure-level incident rather than a brief outage.

The cost of the strikes could be high for the AI and technology company Yandex. The Sasovo facility alone housed two of its supercomputers that are used for development of its AI models. The state of the machines is unclear.

Reach out for further analysis and imagery

At Vertical52, we specialise in remote analysis of conflicts, environmental violence, economic development and much more. We combine methods of open source investigations and geographical information analysis/remote sensing. We are happy to help with access to satellite imagery, spatial investigations and data analysis for stories in your newsroom.

Sources

• BBC: Russian search engine Yandex struggles after Ukrainian strikes on data centres
• BBC Verify on claims about Russian bot networks
• Cloudflare Radar on X
• On-the-ground video, found via Osinttechnical on X
• RBC-Ukraine: Ukraine strikes key Russian defense plant with Yandex data center nearby
• Reuters, 8 October 2026: Yandex says unclear whether data centre can be restored
• Reuters, 11 October 2026: Yandex says data centre in Vladimir area shut down
• Reuters, 13 October 2026: Kremlin discusses Yandex’s problems