Ukraine & Physical Crawler Repositioning Mitigation Efforts

We've received a large number of inquiries from governmental, NGO and civil society groups actively assessing the information conflict environment surrounding Ukraine as to the impact of possible future internet-level interventions on our ability to monitor principle information sources. In anticipation of possible national-level interventions and traffic shaping in the coming days that would impact our global crawler fleets spread across the world, we have taken the extraordinary step of temporarily shifting frontline crawling of principle outlets to specific geographic regions based on anticipated risk levels, given public indications of possibly forthcoming active interventions and are granting our GEN4 crawlers greater latitude in global routing decisions to shift traffic dynamically to other regions of the world far more aggressively than usual.

While our GEN3 and GEN4 infrastructures use self-healing learning architectures to control their global routing and thus should automatically detect interruptions and route further requests around the interventions, given the potential for unprecedented and unpredictable national and regional-scale interventions, we are augmenting these processes for the time being with additional external anticipatory information to assist their routing decisions. Coupled with the underlying hardware-level POP routing of our global traffic, we hope these mitigation strategies are able to maintain uninterrupted monitoring of critical sources.

We are closely monitoring global conditions and will post additional updates moving forward.