Did Ukraine’s strikes on data centers really silence Russian bots?

Recent Ukrainian drone attacks on three Yandex data centers have reportedly knocked out Russia's online propaganda machine, as suggested by posts on social media and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Yandex, a Russian tech giant comparable to Google, operates the country's leading search engine, and the military actions targeted infrastructure that fuels Moscow's war effort. The strikes occurred on Oct. 8, Oct. 9, and Oct. 11, with the first two damaging the data centers, leading to a suspension of operations.

Following the strikes, social media users reported a decrease in right-wing activity from pro-GOP accounts in the U.S. to supporters of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský also noted a drop in online support for the AfD after the attacks. Predictions on the Polymarket platform amplified these claims, though it's important to note the account often posts breaking-news style claims without sources or verification.

Data from Cloudflare Radar, a company that monitors internet traffic, supports the claim that automated web traffic from Yandex's network dropped sharply after Oct. 8 and nearly disappeared by Oct. 11. Some even measured the traffic at just 0.3 percent of its peak, compared to 88.2 percent at the same hour a week earlier. German tech publication t3n also reported similar declines in bot traffic.

However, it's essential to clarify that automated traffic and Russian propaganda bots are distinct. Automated traffic refers to any request sent to a website by software rather than a person, which is common for search engine crawlers and monitoring tools. Knocking Yandex's data centers offline would disrupt traffic, regardless of the presence or absence of propaganda bots.

Moreover, the measurements show a sharp drop in automated network activity, but they cannot definitively prove that propaganda bots disappeared or if damaged infrastructure simply ceased producing ordinary automated traffic.

The data also tracks the proportion of traffic relative to the peak, not the actual number of active social media accounts. There is no published evidence tying Russian influence operations on X or Reddit specifically to Yandex's servers. Many claims linking Russian influence operations to Yandex's servers are sourced from the same Cloudflare Radar and Deep Dive data reports.

It's possible that influence campaigns can run on different infrastructure, and the accounts posting content do not need to reside on Yandex's network.

While the strikes have clearly rattled Russia's internet, causing widespread outages, it is a bigger claim to suggest that they have silenced Russia's online propaganda machine entirely.