Ukraine knocked out three Yandex data centers and the internet decided Kremlin troll farms died with them. We checked Russia's networks: only Yandex went dark

[u/ResPublicaMgz]

Since October 8, Ukrainian drones have hit three Yandex data centers in Ryazan, Kaluga and Vladimir regions. Yandex confirmed several modules were "completely disabled". Search, Yandex Go, payments and cloud services went down across Russia and parts of Central Asia.

Then a Cloudflare chart went viral: bot traffic from Yandex's network dropped to almost zero on October 11. The conclusion online: Kremlin troll farms and pro-AfD, pro-MAGA bot accounts went silent. Today Zelensky repeated it in Warsaw, saying it became "a little easier to breathe" on social media.

That chart measures automated requests to websites coming from Yandex's own network. Most of it is Yandex's search engine crawler, which is why 99.6% of that traffic counts as "bot" in the first place. Knock out the data center and the crawler goes quiet. Even @antibot4navalny, one of the best known trackers of Russian bot networks, says it has "little to do" with propaganda bots on social media.

So we checked where troll farms would actually run: Russia's big mobile and broadband providers. Rostelecom, MTS, Beeline, MegaFon and Russia as a whole all show normal bot traffic this week, almost identical to the week before. No drop after the strikes. MegaFon was even slightly up on October 11 and 12.

The strikes hit Yandex hard. But there's no data showing Russian disinformation went quiet. Caveat: Cloudflare only sees requests to websites behind Cloudflare, not posts on X or TikTok.

[u/ResPublicaMgz]

Sources:

RFE/RL, Zelenskyy quote and expert criticism, Oct 12, 2026: https://www.rferl.org/a/zelenskyy-says-yandex-strikes-crippled-pro-kremlin-bots-but-tech-experts-call-evidence-weak/33875054.html

Cybernews, what the Cloudflare data shows, Oct 12, 2026: https://cybernews.com/news/yandex-data-centers-bot-traffic-drop/

The Moscow Times, Kaluga strike and Yandex confirmation, Oct 9, 2026: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/09/ukraine-drones-hit-second-yandex-data-center-in-two-days-a93927

CNBC, Yandex halts operations after drone strike, Oct 8, 2026: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/08/russia-yandex-ukraine-drone-strike-data-center.html Cloudflare Radar, Yandex AS13238: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238

Cloudflare Radar, Russia overall: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru

Cloudflare Radar, Rostelecom: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as12389

Cloudflare Radar, MTS: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as8359

Cloudflare Radar, Beeline: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as3216

Cloudflare Radar, MegaFon: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as31133

[u/Ok_Water_9376]

Danke. Diese komischen Fake-News dazu haben mich dermaßen genervt. Erfogle zu feiern die keine sind und flasche Hoffnungen zu sehen ist einfach falsch. Die Plattformbetreiber sollten was gegen die Bots tun. Vorallem weil es eigentlich leicht ist deren auffälliges Verhalten zu identifizieren.

[u/ResPublicaMgz → u/Ok_Water_9376]

Sehe ich genauso!

[u/BarrenLandslide → u/Ok_Water_9376]

Wenigstens ist dieses Thema damit jetzt im öffentlichen Fokus. Von daher ein Erfolg.

[u/zanoske00]

This narrative is being pushed to make people think there are less bots and shills pushing red propaganda before midterms.

[u/BarrenLandslide]

Damn. Ukraine got some more work to do it seems.

[u/Sweaty_Explorer_8441]

Any one with some basic IT 101 knowledge would know how stupidly unbelievable that was. Twitter already proved the human bots are far cheaper and effective than small context window AIs; and most of them are from India paid by all sides in 2026 and don't require datacenters. "Bot" work hosted in cloud would almost entirely be scheduled digital work like taking backups or posting reports on telegram which would be disrupted. It's like the narrative was come up by some geriatric uncle.