Yandex Outage Likely Didn’t Impact Russian Bots

In the past week, a series of Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked Russian data centers offline, leading to a significant drop in online bot traffic. However, this decline may not be linked to the type of bot activity that many typically associate with Russia.

A chart based on Cloudflare data has been making the rounds on social media, illustrating a sharp decrease in bot traffic following attacks on Yandex servers, a tech company often referred to as “Russia’s Google.” While some are interpreting this chart as evidence of a reduction in bot farms that spread disinformation and conspiracy theories, the well-known troll farm investigator antibot4navalny clarifies that the data “has nothing to do with social media.”

In a discussion on X, antibot4navalny explained that the chart actually reflects requests from automated Yandex web crawlers. These bots serve various purposes; while they can be misused for hacking and spamming, they are also essential for indexing websites for search engines and providing customer support. Importantly, the chart focuses specifically on Yandex traffic, not the broader bot activity in Russia, which has remained relatively stable despite the data center attacks, according to Cloudflare.

Other charts have emerged claiming a similar decline in Russian disinformation bot activity. One such diagram was shared on X by a European Parliament member, who asserted that online engagement with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party dropped significantly after the Russian data center strikes.

Computer scientist Raphael Wimmer expressed skepticism about the diagram shared by the politician, noting several discrepancies in the activity timeline it purports to track, including a data point for a future date: October 15th. The image seems to have originated from a Threads user, and its source remains unclear, with no mention of the AfD party in the original. Wimmer has attempted to question the user about the image’s origin but has not received a response.

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

Meanwhile, many Yandex-operated services are still offline following the drone strikes, including Yandex Pay, which has left users unable to transfer funds, check balances, or make purchases. Yandex Fintech head Dima Pirogov stated that “we can’t yet give you a precise restoration timeline, but we promise: we won’t stop until the service is restored.”