The Yandex outage probably didn’t blitz Russian bots

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.”

[Image: Many of the charts are sourcing from this Cloudflare data, which is specific to Yandex service activity. https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/CloudFlare-Yandex-bot-decline-chart.jpg?quality=90&strip=all]