r/SipsTea • u/Previous_Month_555 • 4h ago
Feels good man Russian disinformation bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes cripple multiple Russian data centers.
23.8k
Upvotes
r/SipsTea • u/Previous_Month_555 • 4h ago
9
u/deadexternet 4h ago
Ukrainian strikes on October 8–11 damaged or shut down three major Yandex data centers (Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir). Yandex is Russia’s main search/AI/cloud company (sometimes called “Russia’s Google”). The hits disrupted Yandex’s own services—search, maps, cloud computing, AI tools, taxis, etc.—inside Russia. Yandex confirmed the outages, and Reuters, BBC, and others reported them. 
The viral claim
After the strikes, people on X, Reddit, and elsewhere started saying pro-Trump / MAGA / right-wing bots (and similar activity supporting Germany’s AfD) suddenly vanished from social media. Some pointed to Cloudflare Radar charts showing a huge drop (roughly 94–99%) in automated traffic from Yandex’s network. Zelenskyy and a few European politicians echoed versions of the story.
Why that interpretation is wrong
The Cloudflare data mostly tracks YandexBot, Yandex’s search-engine crawler (the Russian equivalent of Googlebot). When the data centers go down, the crawler stops visiting websites to index them. That is ordinary “bot” traffic for a search engine, not social-media accounts posting political content. 
Researchers and analysts who looked at the data (including investigators familiar with Russian influence operations) have pointed out:
• The chart does not measure activity on X, Facebook, Reddit, or other social platforms.
• Troll farms and social-media bot networks are not primarily run through Yandex’s public search/cloud infrastructure in a way this chart would capture.
• Claims of specific drops in AfD or MAGA bot activity have been based on unsourced or flawed charts.
Subjective impressions that some comment sections feel quieter can come from many other things (time of day, platform algorithms, ordinary variation, confirmation bias). There is no solid public evidence that a large volume of pro-Trump bots suddenly disappeared because of these particular data-center strikes.
Russian online influence activity is real and has been documented for years, but the specific story circulating this week—that Ukraine “turned off the Trump bots” by hitting Yandex—is an overreading of the data that spread quickly among people who wanted it to be true.