Did Ukraine’s strikes on data centers really silence Russian bots?

Russia's army of bots is apparently offline. At least, that's according to chatter on social media and even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Over the past week, Ukrainian drones struck three data centers belonging to Yandex, the tech giant often called "Russia’s Google." The first strike happened on Oct. 8, followed by a second attack on Oct. 9. On Sunday, Oct. 11, a third strike damaged a Yandex data center in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow. The company said operations at that facility were completely suspended and some of its services were unavailable, according to the BBC.

The attacks disrupted Yandex services, from its AI chatbot to its smart home devices. Per the BBC, the military strikes were meant to target "places that provide revenue streams for Moscow's war machine."

Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday, Zelenskyy said "everyone noticed" a drop in Russian bot activity on social media after the strikes. On X, Reddit, and elsewhere, users in several Western countries reported seeing less right-wing activity in their feeds, from pro-GOP accounts in the U.S. to supporters of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Czech member of the European Parliament Tomáš Zdechovský also pointed to claims that online support for the AfD had dropped after the strikes.

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The prediction market Polymarket’s X account was among those amplifying the claim. Take that with a grain of salt, though, as the account has a tendency for posting breaking-news-style claims without sources or verification.

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Much of the buzz traces back to a report from U24 Media, the media arm of United24, a platform run by the Ukrainian government.

To its credit, U24’s own report is careful about what the numbers can and can’t prove. It cites an Oct. 12 analysis by The Deep Dive of data from Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet traffic. According to that analysis, automated web traffic from Yandex’s network fell sharply after Oct. 8 and nearly disappeared by Oct. 11. At one point, it measured just 0.3 percent of the chart’s peak, compared with 88.2 percent at the same hour a week earlier. U24 also cites German tech publication t3n's report of a similar plunge — with bot traffic dropping to about 0.4 percent of the previous week’s level before bouncing back to around 20 percent later in the day on Oct. 11.

The catch is that "automated traffic" and "Russian propaganda bots" aren’t the same thing. Automated traffic is any request sent to a website by software rather than a person. Most of it is mundane, e.g., search engine crawlers indexing pages or monitoring tools checking whether sites are up. Because Yandex runs Russia’s biggest search engine, its network constantly sends out crawlers to index the web. Knocking its data centers offline would bring traffic to a halt regardless of whether a single troll account went quiet.

As U24 itself notes, the measurements show a sharp drop in automated network activity, but they can’t tell us whether propaganda bots disappeared or whether damaged infrastructure simply stopped producing ordinary automated traffic. The numbers also track how much traffic Yandex’s network sent relative to its peak, not how many social media accounts were active.

Mashable has yet to see published evidence tying Russian influence operations on X or Reddit to Yandex’s servers specifically. Many of the claims to that effect are sourced from the same Cloudflare Radar and Deep Dive data reports that we cited here.

Influence campaigns can run on infrastructure anywhere, and the accounts posting the content don’t have to live on Yandex’s network at all. It's easy to see why the claim has caught on, as social media platforms are rife with hyper-polarization fueled by ragebait political engagement.

However, not all political content online comes from Russian bots. As The Atlantic's Ali Breland writes, operatives based in Eastern European countries like Latvia are paying people to post pro-GOP talking points — $3 for every 1,000 views.

That also doesn’t mean the strikes had no effect online.

Per U24, the bombings have found a way to rattle Russia’s internet, including widespread outages. Whether it also silenced Russia’s online propaganda machine is a much bigger claim.