Yandex outage probably didn't affect the Russian bots

Multiple Ukrainian drone strikes over the past week have taken Russian data centers offline and reportedly caused a sharp drop in online bot traffic — but in reality it's probably not the kind of bot activity most people associate with Russia. A chart has been circulating across social media platforms citing data from Cloudflare that the sharp decline […]

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At least, not the troll traffic that plagues social media.

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A news writer focused on creative industries, computing and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar covering hardware news and reviews.

A chart circulating across social media platforms citing data from Cloudflare shows a sharp drop in bot traffic following attacks on the servers of Yandex — a tech company often described as the "Google of Russia." While many people are inferring that the graph refers to bot farms spreading disinformation, conspiracy theories and other harmful content to online platforms, well-known troll farm whistleblower antibot4navalny says the data "has nothing to do with social media."

Many graphs are sourced from Cloudflare data specific to Yandex service activity. Image: Cloudflare

In a thread on X, antibot4navalny says that the chart actually measures requests from Yandex's automated web crawlers. These bots have a wide range of uses, so while they can be used maliciously to hack user accounts and target spammers, they are also commonly used to index websites for search engines and provide customer service support. The graph is also specific to Yandex-based traffic and not bot activity from Russia in general — which remains mostly unchanged around data center attacks, according to Cloudflare.

Other charts have been shared showing the same alleged decline in Russian disinformation bot activity. One such chart was shared on X by MEP Tomasz Zedchowski, who claimed that online activity around the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party had dropped sharply following the Russian data center attacks.

Computer scientist Rafael Wimmer says he suspects the source graph shared by Zdechovský was created by artificial intelligence, pointing to several inconsistencies with the timeline of activity it supposedly tracks, including a data point recorded for a future date: October 15. This image appears to have been first posted by Threads user Robin Schellingheider. The source of the data is not specified, and the original source makes no reference to Germany's AfD party. Wimmer says Schellingheider dodged his questions about where the image came from.

Can we (and especially politicians, journalists and scientists who should know better) please stop sharing unverified images?” Wimmer said.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of systems operated by Yandex appear to be unable to transfer funds, check balances or make purchases after the latest drone attack, including digital payment service Yandex Pay. "We still can't give you an exact timeline for restoration, but we promise: we won't stop until service is restored," said Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex fintech, in a statement (translated via Google).

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