HN discussion disputes both the bot narrative and Cloudflare's framing
2 Oct 14 4:29 PM · 3d ago · 2 articles · 4 posts · 10 comments · 3 sources · development 2 of 2
The Cloudflare post reached Hacker News front page, where commenters debated whether the original 'bots went dark' memes were ever credible and whether Cloudflare's rebuttal itself glossed over a bigger story about Russian infrastructure centralization.
“Ukraine did not take Russian social media bots offline by bombing a server farm”
jjaron.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gyCloudflare Internet infrastructure company / analysis authorMarina Elmore Co-author of Cloudflare blog postLai Yi Ohlsen Co-author of Cloudflare blog postYandex Russian tech company whose data centers were struck
The whole story articlespostscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
Reported in the same hours no headline names this development itself — these 5 claims were published in its stretch
-
first by Mastodon, 3d ago · also HN Best, HN Frontpage, Cloudflare Blog
1 more headline
-
first by Tom's Hardware, 3d ago · also UNITED24 Media
1 more headline
- Russian Bot Activity Collapses by 84% After Strikes on Yandex Data Centers, Ukraine Says UNITED24 Media · 1d ago
-
first by Moscow Times EN, 2d ago
-
first by Mastodon, 2d ago
-
first by Mashable, 2d ago
What people said 24 voices · best of 39 · verbatim
-
D
Unexpected side effect of Ukraine hitting Yandex data centers. A lot of the world's bot traffic ran on russian servers. Yandex's own bot and crawler traffic dropped almost to zero. My replies have way fewer russian bots this week. Have you noticed it too?
-
K
""Following reported strikes on # Yandex data centers, claims circulated on the Internet that Russian bot farms and influence operations had been knocked offline. […] However, aggregate traffic metrics can easily mislead. […] we analyzed how these two ASNs were affected — and while both saw drops in traffic, they saw differing impact. Yandex…
-
The popular memes that were based on people's assumptions or guesses or stories based on... cloudflare own tweets!https://x.com/cloudflareradar/status/2108122893028671604https://x.com/CloudflareRadar/status/2110113211059994638Which cloudflare also doesn't mention, that their vague and misleading tweet was responsible for these rumors that they are…
-
Hasn’t the news been saying they didn’t hit the data center at all, and that they actually attacked an oil refinery? They definitely hit 3 Yandex datacenters + one or two Sber ones. It definitely resulted in cloud-hosted services being down, from taxi to b2b solutions and web scrappers. There's no evidence that malicious bots were affected.
-
0
Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation counted 1,526 inauthentic accounts posting into Ukraine’s information space on Facebook and Telegram the day before a drone fire shut Yandex’s data centre at Sasovo. On the day of the fire, 258 posted. https://www. flyingpenguin.com/droning-yand ex-hit-russian-bot-armies-hard-84-drop/ BUT I TYHOUGHT…
-
Does Cloudflare have much if anything to do with X/Twitter and Facebook/Instagram and TikTok, or even Reddit?Presumably these bots make up a very small percentage of traffic in comparison to how much they make up in terms of comments.And I doubt they have visibility on the most popular social networks.The reason these bots are able to succeed is…
-
The bots cant be the only reason. You can spin up new bots on some third-party datacenter in some po-dunk part of the world and get back on track in like a week, tops. Its gotta be what was in those datacenters. What requires storage alongside compute that's worth being this pissy? Why not money? Crypto-currency, to be exact.
-
A
'Cloudflare went digging too. It says the automated traffic running on Yandex’s cloud never stopped. Right after the first strike, identical requests with the same digital fingerprint started coming from other Russian hosting companies. Researchers at the University of Washington checked the accounts themselves and found posts about the AfD went…
-
Rhetorical claims that refute isn't really evidence either, just an attempt to null out the prevailing narrative; SEO spamElon getting snooty and Starlink issues in Ukraine are just press releases too; how the fuck do we know what anyone actually did? Too many red herrings troubleshooting systems to assume Starlink isn't just glitched…
-
So you're a Ukrainian website making up spurious articles with fake numbers, and using it to try to raise money for your slop news site? Can anyone show me actual, non-biased data, that shows a significant reduction in bot traffic? Something that doesnt come from literal state-sponsered media.
-
R
🇷🇺 Russian arbitration courts have been forced to postpone hearings and freeze legal filings following widespread system failures caused by Ukrainian drone attacks on # Yandex data centers, exiled outlet Vyorstka reported Friday. https://www. themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/16/…
-
Confusing crawlbots for spambots missed the far bigger story: Russian government has encouraged adoption of digital services and centralization of them into a small number of handpicked "winners", who form the backbone of state surveillance system. This made the modern infrastructure a very attractive target. Ukrainian strikes on the datacenters…
-
Don't change the subject, why are you making this comparison? It's nonsensical. The alternative to this news source would be something with a tried and true reputation like say, Reuters or AP, not RT?
-
F
Yandex datacenter bombing effectively disrupted Russian influence campaigns: 84% of the accounts went quiet the day Sasovo went down, and the network dropped again when Vladimir went dark. https:// united24media.com/war-in-ukrai ne/russian-bot-activity-collapses-by-84-after-strikes-on-yandex-data-centers-23546
-
Anyone that actually uses Cloudflare and manages their own bot traffic saw those graphs getting passed around and cringed. It has been an interesting thing to watch though as it was disseminated, echoed, and remixed with all sorts of "evidence" of this or that engagement dropping.Russian state actors and propaganda networks literally using…
-
Does Trump feel anger toward Ukraine because he recognizes that Russian bot farms aid his election victories through online misinformation? Is he upset because Ukraine liberated the world?
-
O
Cloudflare posted their own in-depth analysis of the effects of Yandex strikes. Search crawler automation verified, bots started migrating, and footnote: traffic has recovered to 85% pre-strike level. Last night Ukraine did a second pass. https:// blog.cloudflare.com/yandex-out age/
-
Does anyone have the numbers on social media participation? I don't think anyone thought that their ability to execute media influencing activities was completely shutdown, but it did seem that social media was a lot quieter for a time.Easy hypothesis would be that they were (probably accidentally) reliant on the news scraping bots to find where…
-
It was weird when that comment was made “I can say any stupid things I like and you’ll cheer for me” And then people cheered. I feel like that should really haunt you.
-
F
updated. now with more data on Russian attacks on Canada https://www. flyingpenguin.com/droning-yand ex-hit-russian-bot-armies-hard-84-drop/
-
Incidentally, this morning I asked Gemini Argon 4 on High to do deep research on the effect of the strikes on russian bot farms and after some hours (it got stuck) it generated the report starting with a surprising (to me at the time) paragraph:"Rigorous digital forensic scrutiny and network telemetry analysis, however, demonstrate that the…
-
Address the claims instead, mister 4 months old account posting this over and over. Everything so far seems to have those Cloudflare stats as their ultimate source.
-
J
Ukraine did not take Russian social media bots offline by bombing a server farm blog.
-
Just anecdotally I still see as many bots as always. Embrace the bots, have fun with them. # nginx rule to Awaken AWS GuardDuty and GCP SCC, maybe get them to fix a few VMs, enable on all non-wordpress sites after testing in dev/qa location ~* /(xmlrpc|wp-login\.php|wp-admin) { log_not_found off; access_log off; return 301…
All 2 developments of Cloudflare data: Russian bot traffic didn't vanish after… →
MastodonNewswiresXGoogle NewsHacker NewsRedditBluesky