Brief
Cloudflare says Yandex drone strikes did not cripple social media bot networks
Cloudflare’s Radar saw a 99% fall in Yandex Search traffic after the strikes, yet the firm cannot confirm any impact on political bot campaigns.
By Felo News Desk · Published
Ukrainian drones hit Russian tech giant Yandex’s data centres over the past week, prompting President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to claim a sudden drop in Russian bot activity on platforms such as X. Mashable reports that Cloudflare, which monitors global internet traffic, found a more nuanced picture.
Cloudflare’s Radar service recorded a massive outage for Yandex services: traffic from Yandex Search fell 99% and Yandex Cloud fell 90% compared with the pre‑attack baseline. Bot activity on Yandex Cloud dropped 40%, and traffic from "attack‑like" categories fell by 90% or more. The firm notes that much of the lost traffic comes from benign crawlers and scripts, not necessarily from political disinformation bots.
Lai Yi Ohlsen, Head of Radar at Cloudflare, told Mashable that "Bot traffic" refers to automated requests to websites on Cloudflare’s network, such as crawlers and scripts, and not directly to activity on social platforms. Ohlsen added that Radar does not see HTTP traffic destined for specific customers, including X or Reddit, and has no visibility into where accounts posting on those platforms are hosted.
Consequently, Cloudflare cannot substantiate claims that the strikes crippled social‑media manipulation. The company’s own assessment says the data does not appear to support the assertion that the attacks halted disinformation campaigns, though it does not rule out a possible connection without further analysis outside of Cloudflare’s data.
Mashable’s own analysis echoes this uncertainty, stating that while the outage clearly disrupted Yandex’s own services, the broader impact on political bot networks remains unproven.
Key facts
- Cloudflare’s Radar saw Yandex Search traffic drop 99% after the drone strikes (mashable.com)
- Yandex Cloud traffic fell 90% and bot activity on that service fell 40% (mashable.com)
- Cloudflare cannot confirm that the strikes affected political bot campaigns on X or Reddit (mashable.com)
Sources
- [1] mashable.com — originally reported as “Yandex outage: Cloudflare confirms what really happened with the bots”
