This is a new development in a story we reported earlier: Ukrainian drone strikes hit Yandex data centers across Moscow region.
Hortolândia NEWS and Mashable report that a new analysis of Cloudflare Radar data shows that Ukrainian drone strikes on three Yandex data centers in Russia on Oct. 8, Oct. 9 and Oct. 11 did not materially reduce overall Russian bot activity linked to influence operations.
Hortolândia NEWS, RobotToday and Crypto Briefing report that the strikes disrupted Yandex’s core services, including ride‑hailing, navigation and the Yandex Pay payment system, leaving users unable to hail cars, pay for goods or navigate routes. Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex’s Fintech unit, said there is no precise timeline for restoring the offline services, but work to bring them back continues. Meanwhile, damage to the company’s AI‑training supercomputers—Lyapunov, Chervonenkis and Galushkin—may further delay its AI development, while its stock price dropped 4% in the aftermath.
Hortolândia NEWS and Mashable report that, according to Cloudflare Radar data, Yandex’s automated web traffic fell to 0.3% of its peak by Oct. 11, having dropped from 88.2% a week earlier after the Oct. 8 strike. Experts including antibot4navalny and U24 Media argue the decline reflects automated crawler requests for indexing and customer service, not disinformation or propaganda bots. This assessment directly contradicts claims by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and social media users, who asserted the strikes had noticeably reduced Russian bot activity on platforms like X and Reddit. Analyses based on Cloudflare data show that Russian bot activity tied to influence operations stayed largely the same even after the Yandex outage.
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