Russian bot activity plunged 84% after Ukraine hit Yandex data centers, but the bots were back at full strength within two days

Ukraine's CCD says suspected Russian bot posts in its sample fell 83.6% on October 8 after a strike shut Yandex's Sasovo data center The same data shows volume back above pre-strike levels by October 10, with a smaller 42.6% dip after the Vladimir shutdown Cloudflare and Graphika found no comparable drop in Western political communities, though Russian-language Telegram output fell 5% to 15% Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) says suspected Russian bot accounts went almost silent after drones knocked out Yandex data centers earlier this month, with message volume across a monitored network falling 83.6% in a single day.

The findings come from an analytical report the CCD dated October 15 2026.

Using Osavul monitoring software, analysts tracked 22,664 messages from 5,201 accounts showing signs of inauthentic behavior across 26 topics in Ukraine's Facebook and Telegram space between October 6 and 12.

The 83.6% figure is real, but the same report shows those accounts posting more than before within 48 hours, and independent data from Cloudflare shows that at least some of the malicious automation running on Yandex's cloud did not die so much as move house.

A collapse in automated traffic after the Yandex Cloud took a beating The first collapse came on October 8, hours after a drone strike and fire shut down Yandex's Sasovo data center in Ryazan region, home to two of the company's three supercomputers.

Daily messages fell from 4,032 to 660, and active accounts dropped from 1,526 to 258.

Telegram took the harder hit, down 90%, while Facebook fell 79.5%.

A second, shallower dip followed the October 11 strike that Yandex said had completely halted its Vladimir site, with messages falling 42.6% on October 12, from 4,711 to 2,704.

A subgroup of 98 accounts the CCD flagged for justifying the invasion or inciting hatred followed the same curve, down 77.8% on October 8 and 49.2% on October 12.

The most telling detail sits in the middle.

The October 9 strike at Yandex's Kaluga campus, which the company describes as its largest, only partially took the site offline , and the CCD recorded no fall in activity that day.

The two dips line up with the two complete shutdowns, as one would expect if these accounts depended on that infrastructure, though that's not proof on its own.

A surprisingly fast turnaround time? What the 84% figure that the CCD touts leaves out is how briefly the silence held.

Message volume recovered to 2,231 on October 9, then reached 4,585 on October 10 and 4,711 on October 11, both above the pre-strike level.