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Bot traffic from Yandex

539 points • by walrus01 • today at 10:27 AM • 203 comments • view on HN

Comments

londons_explore • today at 11:33 AM

Yandex is Russian Google.

Of course they have bots... That's how you index the web.

If we took Google offline I bet there would also be a reduction in bot traffic from them too!

Indexing is also probably a low priority task, so if half their datacenter capacity is taken offline, their bot traffic probably reduces by more than 50%.

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throwaw12 • today at 12:12 PM

Someone needs to learn how to read the Bot Traffic page.

That is a drop in traffic specifically from Yandex bots (which includes their crawlers and other apps hosted in their DC)

Now compare it with Bot Traffic in:

* Russia: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d

* Europe: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/europe?dateRange=7d

* Worldwide: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d

Dip is barely noticeable even in Russia.

Its like saying, "API requests are completely down" (and small disclaimer: only from your server, because your server is down)

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timr • today at 12:03 PM

Isn't this showing the percentage of bot traffic from the Yandex IP range?

If so, it isn't particularly surprising that the line would go down.

EDIT: yes, it is. Looking at the same graph for all of Russia, and there's no discernible pattern:

https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d

same for the 48h view:

https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=2d

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schleck8 • today at 11:34 AM

The HTTP traffic from Yandex is down to ~ 0 % after the third strike, after the first two strikes already degraded it. I wonder how this looks like at the network level because their search page still serves, but presumably their crawler is inactive now

Edit: Here is some more info, they do have availability issues as is to be expected

> Because three of its primary facilities were knocked offline within four days, Yandex’s failover mechanisms broke down[1][8].

> Outages have cascaded across Yandex Go (taxis), Yandex Pay, food delivery, smart home platforms, internal logistics, and third-party corporate services hosted on Yandex Cloud[2][7]. Problems have spilled into neighboring countries using these systems (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Serbia)[2][7].

Edit 2: Here is the Yandex Cloud status page, their GCP/AWS equivalent. The entire compute core is offline, and even worse, Cloud Backup

https://status.yandex.cloud/ru/dashboard

> ru Compute Cloud, ru Kubernetes, ru PostgreSQL, ru ClickHouse, ru MySQL, ru YDB, ru Kafka, ru Application Load Balancer

Interestingly, Yandex tells its users on the status page to switch to competitors Selectel, K2Cloud, and VK Cloud. Which will probably be hit next

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caidan • today at 4:59 PM

So cloudflare https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d shows 40% of worldwide bot traffic is from the us and <1% is from Russia. So what is this chart of traffic from russias search engine supposed to show?

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f311a • today at 12:15 PM

I can’t believe there are so many dumb comments in this thread. All it shows is that crawling from Yandex search engine stopped from one Yandex data center ASN.

No one runs opinion/malicious bots from data center IPs that people mention here.

Did people actually stop thinking?

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r721 • today at 10:43 AM

*Sudden drop in Cloudflare bot traffic from AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC

UPD Definition of bot traffic from Cloudflare's glossary:

>Bot vs. human traffic

>The percentage of HTTP requests classified as bot versus human, based on bot scores. Requests with a bot score between 1 and 29 are classified as likely automated (bot), while requests with a score of 30 or above are classified as likely human. For more information, refer to Bot classes.

>By default, Radar shows bot vs. human traffic for requests to HTML content. This filter is meant to represent traditional web traffic by excluding API calls, asset requests (images, scripts, fonts), and other machine-to-machine requests.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/radar/glossary/#bot-vs-hum...

https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/concepts/bot-score/

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pluc • today at 11:44 AM

That's some intense mitigation from Cloudflare

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LiamPowell • today at 12:15 PM

Everyone is mentioning crawlers, but wouldn't most traffic from a datacenter's ASN usually be bots just in general given that there's not many humans there to generate human traffic?

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bhouston • today at 12:25 PM

The US is still responsible for almost 50% of traffic of which the top are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Cloudlare.

https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots

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ericpauley • today at 12:00 PM

Interestingly most traffic coming out of this AS was actually UDP: https://dashboard.terracenetworks.com/sources/asns/13238

Pretty benign AS as far as actual exploit or malicious crawling is concerned.

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calin2k • today at 4:52 PM

so much love for russia in the comments, maybe bot operators get some spare time to comment here

karol • today at 1:31 PM

Yandex is reporting an outage for some services. https://dzen.ru/news/story/75e4b917-952d-5304-a9b4-70e5dc1fb...

tkrl-pskl • today at 1:09 PM

Apart from the correct argument that a search engine like Yandex will have crawlers, I would not be surprised if Western AI companies also used Yandex to scrape covertly.

Nvidia tried to pay off the Russian Anna's Archive for stolen data:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

It would not be a surprise if similar deals have been reached with Yandex.

But this is a nice demonstration by Ukraine that all our internet problems are caused by large data centers, wherever they may be located.

speckx • today at 11:53 AM

I have to wonder what will happen when the remaining 6 data centers get hit as well. It's bound to happen.

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beaker52 • today at 12:25 PM

It’s not really surprising that bot traffic originating from a network went away when _all_ traffic originating from that network stopped.

luckystarr • today at 4:36 PM

Does that include the disinformation infrastructure? If so, they should keep it on.

pKropotkin • today at 12:09 PM

Could be just crawlers

accountrequired • today at 12:28 PM

When Brazil and Afrinet? :P

modzu • today at 2:00 PM

propaganda

bamboozled • today at 11:52 AM

I'm going to be really interested how much this cleans up the internet, I mean the damage is done if you read comment sections on youtube etc, but let's see how long the BS persists.

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toomuchtodo • today at 10:33 AM

Cloudflare should consider donating to the Ukrainian military for the public service they are performing.

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dzink • today at 1:23 PM

Now check how many open models search Yandex when asked for something.

fHr • today at 1:40 PM

surprisedpikatchu.jpeg

WiSaGaN • today at 10:43 AM

isn't this only counting russian origin already?

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surfingdino • today at 11:58 AM

So, is sending hot hate towards a bot farm going to be a paid service on Cloudflare now?

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rvz • today at 10:39 AM

“AI agents” is just a fancy rebranding of “bots” with some “intelligence”.

TacticalCoder • today at 12:23 PM

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andrepd • today at 12:29 PM

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dintech • today at 11:57 AM

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salvuccio • today at 12:37 PM

Low-IQ Americans will think these bots are X accounts posting memes against Democrats, which is why the media is astroturfing this news to target American liberals. In reality, most of these bots are just scripts performing normal enterprise jobs, but most people know nothing about how the world works.

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k__ • today at 12:57 PM

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bearjaws • today at 12:01 PM

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blingo2665 • today at 12:21 PM

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