NetBlocks

What is the cost of an internet shutdown? Beyond the tragic loss of life and injuries, the recent internet shutdown in Bangladesh has seen immense economic damage, as you can imagine.

According to Netblock and their cost of shutdown tool, the total financial impact to Bangladesh has been around $393 million for five days of internet shutdown.

For the United States, daily e-commerce trade is valued at $2 billion, and the daily digital economy is about $5.5 billion.

So a complete internet shutdown for one day in the United States could amount to losses in the range north of $7 billion at a bare minimum, just for one day.

Tom's Hardware cites a CloudFlare report that initially said bot traffic dropped significantly after the loss of those data centers.

Global internet monitoring firm NetBlock said that Yandex's network traffic had dropped just 30% for Yandex Cloud and 63% for Yandex LLC.

These attacks have left many ordinary Russians with slower internet or complete disruption.

And Yandex is looking to work with other cloud service providers to further move and protect its data.

These strikes came in response to earlier Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers.

Traffic graphs from Cloudflare and NetBlocks do show significant drops in bot traffic from Yandex as a result of the attacks, though there is some debate about the nature of the bots that have been impacted.

Some social media users anecdotally report seeing a reduction in misinformation and propaganda from bots and suspected bot accounts, while others point out that Yandex is a major source of legitimate web crawling bots used both for search and AI training, and that there are plenty of misinformation bots hosted outside of Russia and likely not in Yandex data centers.

Because if you've ever seen, like, a, a bot data center, a lot of the time it's just phones in a rack.

Our data center infrastructure is damaged.

Firepoint replied, oh no. NetBlocks checks whether networks can be reached.

Two steps down.

Yandex Cloud, 30% of normal.

Uh, but what we have learned is that the Iranians are like, "Yeah, we're very aware that you, that there are sanctions, and that you wouldn't be able to pay it." According to the, the Tech Times, they say, quote, and a- [laughs] analysts say that Iran's awareness of this legal impossibility is deliberate.

Quote, "This makes Iran's demands come off as more of a protection fee, similar to what they've been doing with tankers," according to Isaac Mater, who is the director of research at the London-based internet monitoring group, NetBlocks.

Uh, CNN reported that it's reached out to all the companies that were named, and none of them had responded.

And even though it's only two cables that actually run through Iranian waters, all the cables are, are vulnerable because Iran has the capacity to destroy all of the underwater sea cables.

At least 84 Yandex Cloud services went offline.

NetBlocks measured traffic to its cloud at 30% of normal.

The Cloudflare noticed something else, though.

Bot traffic originating from Yandex infrastructure fell to 0.3% of its previous peak.

OK, so right.

NetBlocks is also observing similar figures on its system as well.

Yandex services go down across several countries after drone strikes on its data centers.

The company invokes force majeure.

And so it's, it's a very similar model to what, uh, Iota's doing.

It's a similar model, I think, to what Netblocks is doing.

Uh-huh.

Um, but he, he's doing it at, like, almost a minute granularity.