Technologycybersecurity
The Yandex outage probably didn’t blitz Russian bots
Recent Ukrainian drone strikes have successfully taken Russian data centers offline, coinciding with a reported sharp drop in online bot traffic. A chart referencing Cloudflare data has widely circulated on social media, suggesting a massive blow to digital disinformation campaigns. However, experts point out that the drop likely does not reflect the malicious political bots most people associate with Russia. The decline in traffic is actually tied to infrastructure supporting legitimate web scraping, automated indexing, and regional services hosted by Yandex. Confusing infrastructure-level automated requests with political influence operations misinterprets how internet architecture and data centers operate.