Were Yandex Data Centers Hit? Satellite and Network Data Examined

But still, that left the question for me about what strikes actually hit what data centers. And NASA has all these satellites that pick up heat from fires all over the world, and it posts all of that raw data on a website called FIRMS.

First, I had to find out where the data centers were, so I went to a website called openstreetmap.com, and it's this free map that anyone can access or edit, really. It's kind of like Wikipedia, but for maps.

And I found where people had labeled all three of the Yandex data center sites.

So I copied their exact coordinates and I threw them over on the fire map.

I first pasted the coordinates for Sasovo, then set the date for the night of the strike, and there it was. I saw a couple of red squares right on top of the factory complex where Yandex's data center sits, and two different satellites caught it, one at about 3:20 in the morning,

and the other at 4:05 in the morning Moscow time. Then I put in Kaluga's coordinates, and nothing.

Same for Vladimir's coordinates. I didn't see anything on top of those data centers, and I did it for a week on both sides of the night that the claims about those data centers being hit were. Well, that's a red flag.

I went to check to see if the computers actually stopped working.

And luckily for us, Georgia Tech runs this great project called the IODA, and it knocks on every door of every network around the world every 10 minutes and counts who answers. And after Sasovo, about a third of it stopped answering.

And then after the alleged Vladimir drone strike, about four out of every five machines had gone silent, and as of this week, it looks like they're still silent. But it's important to note that the green line never moved,

which means that Yandex is still telling the internet where those machines are, so the roads are open to those machines. The machines just aren't answering the door.

The tricky thing here is that these two pieces of data are telling two different stories, right? Because one is showing what burned, and the other is showing what stopped working. But that doesn't necessarily mean that one caused the other. In the case of Sasovo, it kinda does.

It shows that the building burned, and then it went dark.

So I feel comfortable saying for sure that that strike happened.

But Vladimir had caused the biggest blackout of all week, and it didn't look like there was any fire at all. But Yandex did say that it completely suspended operations there, so I can't tell you if Yandex turned it off themselves or if a drone is what turned it off.

The third one was interesting, Kaluga, because it had nothing at all.

There was no fire and no drop in Georgia's tech data.

And on top of that, the only ones that are saying that it was hit is Yandex and the Ukrainian company that makes the drones, and both of them have reasons to say so.

I can only confirm that one of the three had a fire, and that two of the three says it had tech problems. But then I wanted to know who started the silent bot story. On October 10th, a pro-Ukrainian account on X called Tatarigami, I believe. They joked that it would be such a tragedy if

Russia's bot traffic dried up right before the midterms. What?

And then what do you know? The next morning, that same account announced that the Makabots had gone awfully quiet. I mean, it gave no numbers at all, no information beyond that, but oh boy, did that set off the entirety of X. And you know what they say, you can always trust a conclusion that comes before the evidence