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 41 posts and comments
The Cloudflare data confirms the 'Russian bots went dark' narrative was always just an unfounded meme based on vague tweets.
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“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.
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“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.
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“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
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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 -
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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?
2 more of the top 3 · 39 posts in this stretch
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""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…
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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first by Mastodon, 3d ago · also HN Best, HN Frontpage, Cloudflare Blog
1 more headline
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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
and 4 smaller pieces
What people are saying 21 voices from 4 sites · best of 41 · 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?
- Today
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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.
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updated. now with more data on Russian attacks on Canada https://www. flyingpenguin.com/droning-yand ex-hit-russian-bot-armies-hard-84-drop/
- Yesterday
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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…
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
- Oct 16
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🇷🇺 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/…
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'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…
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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
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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.
- Oct 14
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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
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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.