// THE VERGE — MODA & SOCIETÀ
The Yandex outage probably didn’t blitz Russian bots
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At least, not the troll traffic that blights social media.
At least, not the troll traffic that blights social media.
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Multiple Ukrainian drone strikes over the last week have taken Russian data centers offline and reportedly caused online bot traffic to plummet — but in reality it’s probably not the kind of bot activity most people associate with Russia.
A chart citing Cloudflare data has been circulating around social media platforms, showing a sharp decline in bot traffic following attacks on Yandex servers — a technology company often described as “Russia’s Google.” While many people are inferring that the chart refers to bot farms that push disinformation, conspiracy theories, and other harmful content across online platforms, reputed troll farm exposer antibot4navalny says the data “has nothing to do with social media.”
In a thread on X, antibot4navalny says the chart is actually measuring requests from automated Yandex web crawlers. These bots have broad uses, so while they can be used maliciously to hack user accounts and target people with spam, they’re also very commonly used to index websites for search engines and provide customer service support. The chart is also specific to Yandex-based traffic, and not bot activity from Russia at large — which remains largely unchanged around the data center attacks, according to Cloudflare.