Yandex Outage Likely Didn't Disrupt Russian Social Media Bots
Recent Ukrainian drone strikes have reportedly taken down several Russian data centers, including Yandex servers. This has led some social media users to claim a significant drop in bot traffic associated with disinformation and harmful content from Russia. However, experts suggest this decline is not related to the kind of bot activity typically linked to troll farms. The Cloudflare data cited by many appears to track automated requests made by Yandex web crawlers—used for indexing websites or customer service—not malicious social media bots. According to antibot4navalny and others, these are legitimate functions that do not necessarily reflect harmful disinformation campaigns. Additionally, other charts shared online purporting a drop in Russian bot activity have been called into question due to inconsistencies and lack of credible sources. Yandex's services remain largely offline following the attacks, including its Yandex Pay digital payment system. The company has yet to provide an exact timeline for service restoration.
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Topics: bot traffic Cloudflare Russian data centers Ukrainian drone strikes Yandex