Since October 8, Ukrainian drones have hit three Yandex data centers in Ryazan, Kaluga and Vladimir regions. Yandex confirmed several modules were "completely disabled". Search, Yandex Go, payments and cloud services went down across Russia and parts of Central Asia.
Then a Cloudflare chart went viral: bot traffic from Yandex's network dropped to almost zero on October 11. The conclusion online: Kremlin troll farms and pro-AfD, pro-MAGA bot accounts went silent. Today Zelensky repeated it in Warsaw, saying it became "a little easier to breathe" on social media.
That chart measures automated requests to websites coming from Yandex's own network. Most of it is Yandex's search engine crawler, which is why 99.6% of that traffic counts as "bot" in the first place. Knock out the data center and the crawler goes quiet. Even @antibot4navalny, one of the best known trackers of Russian bot networks, says it has "little to do" with propaganda bots on social media.
So we checked where troll farms would actually run: Russia's big mobile and broadband providers. Rostelecom, MTS, Beeline, MegaFon and Russia as a whole all show normal bot traffic this week, almost identical to the week before. No drop after the strikes. MegaFon was even slightly up on October 11 and 12.
The strikes hit Yandex hard. But there's no data showing Russian disinformation went quiet. Caveat: Cloudflare only sees requests to websites behind Cloudflare, not posts on X or TikTok.
Sources:
RFE/RL, Zelenskyy quote and expert criticism, Oct 12, 2026: https://www.rferl.org/a/zelenskyy-says-yandex-strikes-crippled-pro-kremlin-bots-but-tech-experts-call-evidence-weak/33875054.html
Cybernews, what the Cloudflare data shows, Oct 12, 2026: https://cybernews.com/news/yandex-data-centers-bot-traffic-drop/
The Moscow Times, Kaluga strike and Yandex confirmation, Oct 9, 2026: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/09/ukraine-drones-hit-second-yandex-data-center-in-two-days-a93927
CNBC, Yandex halts operations after drone strike, Oct 8, 2026: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/08/russia-yandex-ukraine-drone-strike-data-center.html
Cloudflare Radar, Yandex AS13238: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238
Cloudflare Radar, Russia overall: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru
Cloudflare Radar, Rostelecom: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as12389
Cloudflare Radar, MTS: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as8359
Cloudflare Radar, Beeline: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as3216
Cloudflare Radar, MegaFon: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as31133