The ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war has mixed the digital and the kinetic in unprecedented and often terrifying ways, including widespread use of suicide drones, software orchestration of the front lines, and the weaponization of commercial ad data. So it’s hardly surprising that Ukraine has hit data centers of Russian-based tech giant Yandex (sort of a Facebook/Google/Uber hybrid) three times in the past few days. The most recent strike, on October 11, is said to have completely disabled a facility in the Vladimir region east of Moscow.
The result was widespread outages of Russian Internet services, both inside and outside the country. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the result was also almost immediately silencing the army of pro-Russian troll bots on social media.
“When we started to respond to Russia’s operation against our data centers and when our strikes reached Yandex data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelenskyy told participants at the Warsaw Security Forum via video link, according to Euronews.
“A lot of people, a lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and less provocations because there were less bots,” he added. “And it’s pretty clear where those bots come from… If they disappeared when Yandex went offline, that proves again and again that Europe is not the source of the problems.”
Euronews noted that Cloudflare data showed a large drop (94%) in automated traffic from Yandex on Sunday compared to the average in the second half of September. That said, automated traffic is a huge umbrella that includes everything from search crawlers to uptime monitoring tools.
Euronews also found that social media users in other countries, such as Germany, the UK and the US, also claim to see a decrease in bots; this was apparently based on vibes. Online “prediction market” Polymarket also tweeted that “activity on several major US political subreddits drops after attacks on Russian data centers”, although this claim was not accompanied by evidence.
Insisting that online rivals are secretly bots is a time-honored post tactic, one of the few bipartisan left – it’s pretty hard to find a Reddit thread on the front page that doesn’t have at least a few comments insisting that “the bots are really out today.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a US government-funded broadcaster serving mainly foreign audiences, noted that technical experts pointed out that the supposed drop in automated traffic from Yandex’s own search crawler was hitting websites with AS13238 HTTP requests. As a result, it does not reveal anything about the wider volume of Russian Internet traffic or what it contains.
Finally, this stat only accounts for Russian web traffic, which has already been categorized as automated. Russian cyber adversaries would presumably make at least some kind of redundant effort to obfuscate their traffic, including by locating the hosts in other countries where the traffic is less likely to be recognized as Russian.
Some of the claims seem to combine data centers with Russian “troll farms” such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which became known after an Expo 2015. The IRA came from a St. There also doesn’t seem to be any particular reason that IRA requires an inordinate amount of network resources.
In reality, facilities like the IRA’s or scammer compounds in Myanmar are usually described as more like clickbait factories or digital sweatshops than sophisticated, high-tech operations. In other words: cheap labor and automation. A Latvian influencer operation that specializes in MAGA content for US conservatives pays subcontractors in poor countries around the world to clip videos.
That said, the wide range of Russian services forced offline by the strikes (video streaming, banking, apps, and various websites, according to Ars Technica) presumably saw all kinds of activity hacked, including posting. Yandex Go, a taxi assistance and delivery app, was still experiencing outages in “Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan” as of Monday, according to RFE/RL.
“Following a drone attack, the infrastructure of the Vladimir data center has been damaged,” Yandex said in a statement on Telegram, according to Euronews. “Data center operations are completely suspended. Remaining infrastructure resources are unstable and the platform is down.”