The Yandex outage probably didn’t blitz Russian bots
At least, not the troll traffic that blights social media.
At least, not the troll traffic that blights social media.
by
Jess Weatherbed
Oct 12, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images
Jess Weatherbed
is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.
MultipleUkrainian drone strikesover the last week have taken Russian data centers offline and reportedly caused online bot traffic to plummet — but in reality it’s probably not the kind of bot activity most people associate with Russia.
Achart citing Cloudflare datahas been circulating around social media platforms, showinga sharp declinein bot traffic following attacks on Yandex servers — a technology company often described as “Russia’s Google.” While many people are inferring that the chart refers to bot farms thatpush disinformation, conspiracy theories, andother harmful contentacross online platforms, reputed troll farm exposerantibot4navalnysays the data “has nothing to do with social media.”
Image: Cloudflare
In a thread on X, antibot4navalny says the chart is actually measuring requests from automated Yandex web crawlers. These bots have broad uses, so while theycanbe used maliciously to hack user accounts and target people with spam, they’re also very commonly used to index websites for search engines and provide customer service support. The chart is also specific to Yandex-based traffic, and not bot activity from Russia at large — which remains largely unchanged around the data center attacks,according to Cloudflare.
Other chartshave also been shared that show the same alleged decline in Russian disinformation bot activity. One such diagram was shared on X by European Parliament memberTomáš Zdechovský, who claimed that online activity around the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party plummeted following the Russian data center attacks.
Computer scientistRaphael Wimmersays he suspects the source diagram shared by Zdechovský is AI-generated, pointing out several inconsistencies with the activity timeline it’s supposedly tracking, including a data point logged for a future date: October 15th. The image appears to have first been posted byThreads user Robin Schlingheider. The data’s source isn’t established, and the original doesn’t include any reference to Germany’s AfD party. Wimmer says Schlingheider has evaded his questions about where the image originated.
“Could we (and especially politicians, journalists and scientists who should know better) please stop sharing unverified images?” Wimmer said.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Yandex-operated systems stillappear to be offlinefollowing the latest drone strike, including the Yandex Pay digital payment service, leaving users unable to transfer funds, check balances, or make purchases. Yandex Fintech headDima Pirogovsaid in a statement (translated via Google) that “we can’t yet give you a precise restoration timeline, but we promise: we won’t stop until the service is restored.”
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