Multiple Ukrainian drone strikes over 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.
A chart citing Cloudflare data has been circulating around social media platforms, showing a sharp decline in 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 that push disinformation, conspiracy theories, and other harmful content across online platforms, reputed troll farm exposer antibot4navalny says the data “has nothing to do with social media.”
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 they can be 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 charts have also been shared that show the same alleged decline in Russian disinformation bot activity. One such diagram was shared on X by European Parliament member Tomáš Zdechovský, who claimed that online activity around the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party plummeted following the Russian data center attacks.
Computer scientist Raphael Wimmer says 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 by Threads 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 still appear to be offline following the latest drone strike, including the Yandex Pay digital payment service, leaving users unable to transfer funds, check balances, or make purchases. Yandex Fintech head Dima Pirogov said 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.”