Ukrainian Strikes on Yandex Datacenters and Their Effect on Russian Disinformation

Over the weekend Ukraine carried out at least three airstrikes on datacenters owned by the Russian search-engine company Yandex. Telegram footage showed one facility on fire, and Yandex confirmed the attacks. Russian media reported that the damage knocked out a range of services, including major banks, retailers, sports apps and Yandex’s own platforms such as Yandex Go and Yandex Eats.

The Guardian

Khan added that Yandex datacenters have no practical link to social-media bot farms.

The Guardian

Cloudflare data shows a pronounced decline in traffic from bots linked to the Yandex network on October 8 and October 11, dates that match two of the strikes. The drop reflects reduced activity of Yandex’s web crawlers—software that makes automated web requests to index sites—not the automated troll accounts used by state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.

The Guardian

Internet-infrastructure specialist Michal ‘Rysiek’ Wozniak explained that “The term ‘bot’ can mean many different things,” emphasizing the distinction between search-engine crawlers and political-propaganda bots. He noted that any impact on disinformation networks would be indirect. Ned Mendez, head of research at Alliance4Europe, said serious bot operations now rely on distributed methods such as residential connections and phone farms, which are not easily disabled by airstrikes.

The Guardian

• “Our platforms are still monitoring Russian social networks across the world and there is no discernible change in their posting patterns,” — Amil Khan, the chief executive of Valent, a tech startup that tracks disinformation

The Guardian

• “The term ‘bot’ can mean many different things,” — Micha

The Guardian