OPINION
When the power goes out on my street, I don’t notice the neighbors getting quieter and decide they were all run by the electric company. But that, more or less, is what a good part of the internet did on Sunday.
Over four days last week, Ukrainian drones hit three data centers belonging to Yandex, the company Russians use for search, maps, taxis, groceries and paying for all of it. Early Sunday, UTC, the Vladimir site shut down. The internet company Cloudflare posted a chart showing that requests coming from Yandex’s network had fallen 99% compared with the week before. Tom’s Hardware called it “bot traffic from the Yandex network,” which is technically true in the way that calling a mail carrier “a person who reads your address” is technically true.
Within a day the chart had a second career. In Germany, people reported that online activity around the far-right AfD had dropped. In Britain, it was Reform UK. In the United States, users said the pro-conservative reply guys on X had gone suspiciously quiet. A Czech member of the European Parliament posted the chart and said that, if confirmed, it was telling. On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Warsaw Security Forum that once the strikes reached Yandex, social media had become “a little easier to breathe.”
What the 99% was counting
I went and looked at the chart. Its title is “HTTP traffic from AS13238,” which is Yandex’s network number. It counts every web request Yandex’s machines send to sites that Cloudflare protects. Yandex runs a search engine, and search engines send crawlers to read websites all day long so they can be indexed. That’s what nearly all of the traffic is. The Deep Dive, a Canadian site that read through Cloudflare’s numbers, found automated requests made up 99.6% of the network’s traffic over a normal week.
So the drones knocked out the servers, and the servers stopped crawling the web. The researcher behind @antibot4navalny, who tracks Kremlin troll networks for a living, told Radio Free Europe that the chart “has little to do with malicious propaganda bots on social media.” Euronews, whose own headline asked whether bot activity had plummeted, conceded a few paragraphs down that the data can’t show any Kremlin-linked bot was affected.
I haven’t found anyone who has measured posts on X, Facebook or anywhere else falling after the strikes. Researchers told RFE/RL the rest of the evidence is largely anecdotal, which comes down to people saying their replies felt nicer, which is also how I feel when I stop reading the replies.
The case that the bots were real
None of this means Russian bots are a fantasy, and the people who jumped at the chart weren’t jumping at nothing. In July 2024 the Justice Department seized two domains that had been used to register 968 accounts on X for a Russian bot farm. Warrants issued in federal court in Arizona allege that the accounts were created at the behest of a deputy editor-in-chief of RT, the Russian state broadcaster, and that the project was later folded into a private intelligence organization set up by an officer of the FSB. Its software, called Meliorator, could create fake personas in bulk, mimic ordinary users and reply to American candidates as if from their home districts. It was real, and it was aimed at American politics. With the midterms a few weeks away, it’s reasonable to wonder whether an outage at Russia’s biggest tech company touched something like it. The chart doesn’t prove that it did. It doesn’t prove that it didn’t, either, and neither does anything else published this week. When a population has been told for years that some of the voices in the room are fake, it isn’t paranoid to notice when the room changes.
But noticing a change isn’t measuring one. The Meliorator case is a useful reminder of what the evidence looks like when it exists: court warrants, registrar records, named domains, accounts that X then suspended. It took the FBI and two court warrants to pin down 968 accounts. Social media found a whole Russian bot army in a crawler chart by Sunday.
Even the real operations seem to have a reach problem. When the farm was taken down, CyberScoop noted that Meta and OpenAI had both reported that Russian influence efforts using AI were largely failing to reach big audiences. Asked for comment, Anna Belkina, RT’s head of communications, told CyberScoop she was happy to tend her own farm, a dacha planted mostly with “tomatoes and strawberries.”
A convenient kind of blackout
The bots took the blame for AfD, Reform UK and MAGA alike, and I haven’t seen anyone check whether the left-leaning accounts got quieter too. The appeal of the bot theory was that it sorted the people you disagree with into a server rack in Ryazan, where a drone could deal with them.
That’s a lot to ask of a search engine’s crawler. Cloudflare’s chart shows Yandex’s traffic climbing back later on Sunday, still well short of normal on Monday. If the AfD’s numbers recover on the same schedule, I’ll reconsider.
Sources
- Cloudflare Radar on X (Oct. 12, 2026) and Cloudflare Radar, AS13238 traffic page. Used for: the 99% drop, the chart’s title and the partial recovery.
- Tom’s Hardware, “Russia’s Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes” (Oct. 11, 2026). Used for: the “bot traffic” framing.
- Euronews, “Did Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centres cause Russian bot activity to plummet?” (Oct. 12, 2026). Used for: Zelensky’s remark, the AfD, Reform UK and U.S. claims, the Czech MEP and the crawler caveat.
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Zelenskyy Says Yandex Strikes Crippled Pro-Kremlin Bots But Tech Experts Question Evidence” (Oct. 12, 2026). Used for: the @antibot4navalny researcher and the date and setting of Zelensky’s remarks.
- The Deep Dive, “Bot Traffic from Yandex’s Network Falls to Near Zero After Third Drone Strike” (Oct. 12, 2026). Used for: the 99.6% automated share.
- The Record, “Ukraine strikes third Yandex data center, disrupting digital services across Russia” (Oct. 12, 2026). Used for: the three strikes and the Vladimir shutdown.
- CyberScoop, “US, international authorities seize Russian AI bot farm” (July 9, 2024). Used for: the 968 accounts, the Arizona warrants, RT and the FSB, Meliorator’s capabilities, the Meta and OpenAI findings and RT’s response.
- The Hacker News, “U.S. Seizes Domains Used by AI-Powered Russian Bot Farm for Disinformation” (July 2024). Used for: the 968 accounts, the two domains and X’s suspension of the accounts.
We reported the strikes and the Cloudflare data in Yandex Strikes and the Russian Bot Claim: What the Data Shows.