The Yandex outage probably didn’t blitz Russian bots

Reports linked Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian data centers to a sharp drop in bot traffic shown in Cloudflare data. The article says the decline likely reflects automated activity tied to Yandex services, such as web crawlers, rather than disinformation bot farms or troll operations.

The confusion highlights how easily generic internet telemetry can be misread when the term “bot” is treated as synonymous with influence operations. It also shows that attacks on infrastructure can disrupt visible online activity without necessarily degrading a state’s propaganda networks.