The Yandex Outage: A Setback for Russian Bots?

Recent multiple drone strikes by Ukrainian forces have caused significant disruptions to Russian data centers, leading to a sharp decline in online bot traffic. However, the nature of this bot activity may not be what most people commonly associate with Russia.

A chart based on Cloudflare data has been circulating on social media platforms, indicating a notable decrease in bot traffic following the attacks on Yandex servers, often referred to as “Russia’s Google.” While many have interpreted this data as a decline in bot activity related to spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories online, an expert known for exposing troll farms, antibot4navalny, clarifies that the data is not linked to social media activities.

According to antibot4navalny, the chart actually tracks requests from automated Yandex web crawlers, which have various legitimate uses. While these bots can potentially be used for malicious purposes such as hacking and spamming, they are commonly employed for indexing websites for search engines and providing customer support. The data specifically pertains to Yandex-based traffic and does not reflect overall bot activity from Russia, which remains relatively unaffected by the data center attacks as per Cloudflare’s observations.

Other charts circulating online also indicate a perceived decrease in Russian disinformation bot activity. European Parliament member Tomáš Zdechovský shared one such chart suggesting a drop in online activity related to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party following the Russian data center attacks.

Computer scientist Raphael Wimmer raises suspicions about the authenticity of the chart shared by Zdechovský, pointing out inconsistencies in the timeline it supposedly represents. He highlights a data point referencing a future date, casting doubt on the chart’s accuracy. The origin of the data is unclear, and the original image lacks any mention of Germany’s AfD party. Wimmer urges caution in sharing unverified images to avoid misinformation.

Despite efforts to restore operations, the majority of Yandex-operated systems, including the Yandex Pay digital payment service, remain offline after the recent drone strike. Users are currently unable to perform transactions, check balances, or make purchases. Yandex Fintech head Dima Pirogov reassures users that restoration efforts are ongoing, although a precise timeline for service recovery has not been determined.