Yandex Outage Fuels Bot Traffic Claims, but Data Points to Web Crawlers

A chart citing Cloudflare data has spread across social media, showing a sharp decline in bot traffic after attacks on Yandex servers. Yandex is often described as "Russia's Google." Many people inferred that the decline reflected bot farms that push disinformation, conspiracy theories and other harmful content across online platforms. The account antibot4navalny, known for exposing troll farms, said in a thread on X that the data "has nothing to do with social media."

According to antibot4navalny, the chart measures requests from automated Yandex web crawlers. Such bots have broad uses. They can be used maliciously to hack user accounts or target people with spam, but they are also commonly used to index websites for search engines and to provide customer service support. The chart is specific to Yandex-based traffic and does not represent bot activity from Russia at large. Cloudflare said Russian bot activity remained largely unchanged around the data center attacks, according to The Verge.

Other charts have been shared to show the same alleged decline in Russian disinformation bot activity. European Parliament member Tomáš Zdechovský shared one such diagram on X and claimed that online activity around the far-right Alternative for Germany party plummeted after the Russian data center attacks. Computer scientist Raphael Wimmer said he suspects the source diagram shared by Zdechovský is AI-generated, pointing to several inconsistencies with the activity timeline it supposedly tracks, including a data point logged for a future date, October 15th. The image appears to have first been posted by Threads user Robin Schlingheider. The data's source is not established, and the original does not include any reference to Germany's AfD party. Wimmer said Schlingheider has evaded his questions about where the image originated. "Could we (and especially politicians, journalists and scientists who should know better) please stop sharing unverified images?" Wimmer said.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of Yandex-operated systems still appeared to be offline after the latest drone strike, including the Yandex Pay digital payment service. Users were left unable to transfer funds, check balances or make purchases. Yandex Fintech head Dima Pirogov said in a statement, translated via Google, that "we can't yet give you a precise restoration timeline, but we promise: we won't stop until the service is restored."