Cloudflare data: Russian bot traffic didn't vanish after Yandex strikes, it moved
Analysis of Cloudflare Radar data finds no evidence that Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers disrupted Russian bot farms or influence operations.
What to know
- Cloudflare's own traffic data is the basis for both the viral 'bots went dark' claim and the rebuttal of it, since two different Yandex ASNs (search vs. cloud) behaved very differently.
- The search-crawling ASN (AS13238) did collapse with the strikes, but the cloud-hosting ASN's (AS200350) bot traffic — which looked more like software/script traffic than verified crawlers — showed no detectable global disruption.
- Commenters are split between those who see this as debunking an overhyped meme and those who argue Cloudflare's rebuttal itself misses the larger story of Russian infrastructure centralization and surveillance risk from the strikes.
The dispute Whether Cloudflare's traffic data actually proves anything about social media bot activity, given Cloudflare has little visibility into platforms like X, Facebook, or TikTok where the alleged influence operations run. · positions read across 25 posts and comments
The Cloudflare data confirms the 'Russian bots went dark' narrative was always just an unfounded meme based on vague tweets.
-
“Buried lede:>across Cloudflare's network, there was no evidence that the strikes knocked social media manipulation offline or otherwise disrupted malicious activity on the Internet.<p>This directly refutes the popular memes going around…”
gruez · Hacker News ↗
The real story is Russia's dangerous centralization of state services into a few providers like Yandex, which Cloudflare's framing ignores.
-
“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…”
mopsi · Hacker News ↗
No one can really verify what happened; both sides of the conflict have incentives to spin the story, and Cloudflare's own data visibility is limited.
-
“Rhetorical claims that refute isn't really evidence either, just an attempt to null out the prevailing narrative; SEO spam”
bubbluppugus · Hacker News ↗
Cloudflare 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
How it unfolded 2 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlespostscomments
-
2
HN discussion disputes both the bot narrative and Cloudflare's framing
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.gy -
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…
2 more of the top 3 · 23 posts in this stretch
-
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.
-
-
1
Cloudflare publishes analysis refuting the bot-collapse narrative
Cloudflare's blog post, using Radar and Bot Management data, finds that Yandex Search's crawler traffic (93.6% Verified bots) collapsed, but Yandex.Cloud's unverified, app-like bot traffic showed no evidence of a global disruption to malicious activity.
“across Cloudflare's network, there was no evidence that the strikes knocked social media manipulation offline or otherwise disrupted malicious activity on the Internet…”
— Cloudflare -
background
Yandex networks remain disrupted days after the strikes — Both Yandex ASNs stayed 86-90% below normal baselines through October 13, with traffic still at 85% of normal as of October 14 18:00 UTC.
-
background
Online claims spread that Russian bot farms went offline — HTTP traffic charts showing steep drops fueled speculation on social media that the strikes had disabled Russian bot farms and influence operations.
-
background
Yandex network traffic collapses to near-total outage — Traffic plummeted to 99% below baseline for Yandex Search (AS13238) and 90% below baseline for Yandex.Cloud (AS200350), per Cloudflare Radar.
-
background
Ukrainian drone strikes begin hitting Yandex data centers — Reported strikes hit three Yandex facilities in Russia between October 7 and 11, progressively knocking data centers and network capacity offline.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
-
first by Mastodon, 2d ago · also HN Best, HN Frontpage, Cloudflare Blog
1 more headline
and 5 smaller pieces
What people are saying 21 voices from 3 sites · best of 25 · verbatim
- Did social media engagement from Russian accounts actually drop during the outage, independent of Cloudflare's web-traffic data?
- What are the broader consequences of Yandex.Cloud being degraded for over a week for ordinary Russian users and businesses?
- Yesterday
-
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/…
-
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…
-
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/
- Oct 15
-
Turns out, the useful idiots doing the bidding of the German regime spread disinformation, as they always do.They truly learned from the best, the most expensive state media (pronounced "Pro-pa-gan-da") in the world.
-
CloudFlare commentary: https:// blog.cloudflare.com/yandex-out age/
-
At this point Cloudflare should be considered Digital Stasi and wrongthink censoring bureau of the internet, it is maliciously totalitarian towards unrestricted and free internet.Cloudflare employees should come out whistleblowing if they have internal hard evidence of this.
- Oct 14
-
Just another reminder that false information spreads very fast and will continue to exist for a long time, even if all news provides updates about false information, because such news will not be engaging So, this is a good example of how propaganda works
-
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…
-
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…
-
J
Ukraine did not take Russian social media bots offline by bombing a server farm blog.
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Additionally,> Following the reported strikes, bot traffic from Yandex.Cloud fell about 40%. … Cloudflare customer blocks on Yandex.Cloud traffic also fell 70% during the event period, suggesting that proportionately less malicious traffic was even hitting the Cloudflare WAF from this ASNBut the memes keep rolling. 57 channels and nothing on.
-
What I’m far more interested in is what the consequences of Yandex cloud being offline are.I feel like if us-east-1 was down for a week we’d see all kinds of consequences in everyday services. Are Russians enjoying the same?
-
I don't understand why they are just starting with the assumption that all of the bot traffic would just go straight out to the internet from their ASNsIf it were a professional operation, the first thing you would do would be to not give away the source of where the traffic is coming from and route the traffic through an intermediary.
-
Buried lede:>across Cloudflare's network, there was no evidence that the strikes knocked social media manipulation offline or otherwise disrupted malicious activity on the Internet.This directly refutes the popular memes going around that russian trolls magically went offline because of the attack.
-
After a series of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian data centers over the last 4 days, 78% of Yandex Cloud's network stopped responding to outside connections. The data from IODA shows a massive interruption to the Russian internet giant's system.
- Oct 12
-
I would really like to see a data journalist do a deep dive on the actual statistics from the different SoMe platforms (X, Bsky, mastodon, Facebook) to see what the yandex outage has done to activity on them. I'm wildly curious about the bots and the trolls, also on a country level.