Yandex outage: Cloudflare confirms what really happened with Russian bots

Ukrainian drones struck data centers belonging to Russian tech giant Yandex over the past week.

Following the strikes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that there was a sudden drop in Russian bot activity and political disinformation campaigns on platforms like X.

Social media users took the story — Ukraine had taken out a massive Russian bot operation — and ran with it.

However, a new report from Cloudflare, which monitors internet traffic, tells a more complicated story.

Cloudflare found that while there was some bot interruption, bot operators were able to quickly migrate their systems to alternative cloud operators and continue running undeterred.

Furthermore, Cloudflare could not determine if this disruption in bot activity had any effect on social media campaigns specifically.

How did the Yandex strikes affect social media bots? A lot of the confusion stems from the fact that people are using the word "bot" to refer to distinct types of activity.

"'Bot traffic' refers to automated requests to websites on Cloudflare's network, such as crawlers and scripts, not necessarily activity on social media platforms," said Lai Yi Ohlsen, Head of Radar, a Cloudflare monitoring tool.

So, while social commentators have used Cloudflare's data to state that the strikes had a major effect on social media bots , that's not quite right.

Ohlsen told Mashable that "Radar does not have visibility into HTTP traffic reaching any specific customer, including X or Reddit," and that "Radar does not have any visibility into where accounts posting on those platforms are hosted." In short, Cloudflare data can't substantiate the claims that the strikes affected social media disinformation campaigns, but the company didn't rule out the possibility entirely.

"Based on our assessment, the data does not appear to support the claims that the strikes crippled social media manipulation, though without further analysis with data outside of Cloudflare, we cannot conclusively say there is no connection," the company said in its report.

Want to learn more about getting the best out of your tech? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories and Deals newsletters today.

How the Yandex drone strikes affected Russian bots After Ukraine's attack on the Yandex data centers, Cloudflare's Radar service picked up a massive outage, as traffic from Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud dropped off.

Traffic from Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud fell 99 percent and 90 percent, respectively, below the pre-attack baseline.