Yandex Outage Likely Did Not Cut Russian Disinformation Bots, Researchers Say
After Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian data centers, charts claiming a drop in Russian bot activity have spread online. Researchers say the data reflects Yandex web crawlers, not disinformation networks.
Ukrainian drone strikes over the past week have knocked several Russian data centers offline, and a chart showing a sharp fall in bot traffic is circulating widely on social media. However, it most likely does not concern the disinformation and troll-farm activity most people associate with Russia. The strikes hit servers of Yandex, a technology company often called “Russia’s Google.”
The chart cites data from Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure company, and shows traffic dropping sharply after the attacks. Many users read it as evidence that the spread of disinformation had gone quiet. A troll-farm researcher posting as antibot4navalny wrote on X that the data “has nothing to do with social media.”
According to this researcher, the chart measures requests from automated Yandex web crawlers. Such programs can be misused, for example to hack accounts or send spam, but they are also widely used to index websites for search engines and to provide customer support. The chart covers only Yandex traffic, while Cloudflare data indicates bot activity across Russia as a whole stayed largely unchanged around the time of the strikes.
Another chart questioned
Another diagram spread after Tomáš Zdechovský, a member of the European Parliament, claimed that online activity around the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party fell sharply following the data center attacks. Computer scientist Raphael Wimmer suspects the image is AI-generated, citing inconsistencies in its timeline, including a data point for a future date, October 15. The image appears to have been first posted by Threads user Robin Schlingheider. Its data source is unknown, and the original makes no mention of the AfD. Wimmer says Schlingheider has avoided his questions about where it came from. He urged people to stop sharing unverified images.
Yandex services still down
Most Yandex-operated systems still appear to be offline after the latest strike, including the Yandex Pay payment service. Users cannot transfer funds, check balances or make purchases. Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex Fintech, said there is no precise restoration timeline yet, but that work will continue until the service is restored.
