Ukraine knocked out Yandex's data centers. No, the Russian bots didn't vanish.

Over four days, Ukrainian drones hit three Yandex data centers: Sasovo on Oct. 8, Kaluga on Oct. 9, and Vladimir on Oct. 11. Yandex confirmed the damage and shut Sasovo and Vladimir down completely. Yandex Cloud went into emergency mode, and outages spread to banks, retailers, Russian Railways, and state outlets like RIA Novosti and Interfax. Ukraine calls it a "symmetrical response" to Russia's September strikes on Kyiv's data centers and mobile networks.

Then a chart went viral. Cloudflare Radar showed "bot traffic" from Yandex's network collapsing to under 1% of its peak, and people declared the Kremlin's troll farms dead. Some said Threads and Reddit had gone quiet.

The chart is real, but that reading is wrong. Researchers at antibot4navalny, who track Russian troll farms, say it mostly measures Yandex's search crawlers going dark, not accounts pushing propaganda. Cloudflare's data shows overall bot traffic from Russia barely moved. Real influence operations hide behind proxies, VPNs, and Western clouds, and Reddit and Facebook already block known Russian data-center traffic. Reddit's roughly 8% dip in estimated web visits came in September, before the strikes.

The real story is Russia's digital spine. Yandex runs much of the stack the Kremlin leans on for state media, payments, and data. That centralized system turned out to be fragile, and recovery may take months. The other lesson is about disinformation: a satisfying chart isn't evidence until you know what it measures.

Sources: Kyiv Post, Ars Technica, Meduza, The Verge, RFE/RL, Cybernews, Nectiv on Reddit traffic