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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
After a series of Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers, the activity of Russian bots on the network sharply declined. Automated traffic was reduced almost to zero, and dozens of the company’s services stopped functioning.
Where did the Russian bots go?
According to Cloudflare Radar, the activity of Russian bots on the Yandex network fell to 0,4% of the maximum amount of automated HTTP requests recorded over the previous two weeks, writes Tom's Hardware.
The first noticeable drop occurred 8 in October after the drone strike on the data center in the town of Sasovo in Ryazan region. On the premises stood two supercomputers of the company, and bot traffic then fell to about 57% of the previous maximum. A fire also broke out at the Sasta machine-building plant.
Later, a larger Yandex complex in Kaluga, which also ceased operation, came under attack. The forces of defense struck it with FP-1 drones.
11 in October the organization NetBlocks, which monitors internet status, reported another sharp traffic reduction after the attack on the company’s data centers in Vladimir. Due to power outages, there was a large-scale outage in the operation of the Yandex Cloud cloud platform and a number of other services.
How severely were the services affected
As a result of infrastructure damage, at least 84 Yandex Cloud services became unavailable. According to NetBlocks, network traffic of Yandex Cloud declined to 30% of the normal level, and Yandex LLC to 63%. Such outages may slow down online services or completely cut off access to them.
Why did the bots disappear along with the data centers
There is a direct link in that the bots went quiet together with the destruction of Yandex data centers. Military man Andrii Kovalenko from the Center for Combating Disinformation says the link is real, because some of them operate on “virtualized Yandex Cloud.” Without restoration from backups, the scripts simply do not run.
He adds that some bots also use YandexGPT — this also explains the decline in bot farms in Germany, since language models for generating comments and content are very important.
The situation is temporary but useful and demonstrative. These are military goals, because bot farms are tools of cognitive warfare,
— summed up Andrii Kovalenko.
Fuel
Average prices at the Amic Energy gas station network as of
The effect was noticed by social media users. Right now on Threads and X there are dozens of posts about bots being fewer, according to user observations. They are not posting their usual updates and do not comment on others' posts.
There are also signs that a large number of MAGA activists and supporters, as well as supporters of the "Free Palestine" movement, disappeared from the network. This may mean that at least some of these accounts, which for years spread panic, disinformation, and provoked hatred between groups of people with different views, are being managed from Russia.
This was said by the President of Ukraine in a speech at the Warsaw Security Forum.
When we started responding to the Russian operation against our data centers and when our strikes reached Yandex data centers, on many social platforms there was suddenly a little easier to breathe. Many noticed it. There was less hatred, less hostility, and fewer provocations,
— said Volodymyr Zelensky.
He added that bots indeed became fewer, so it is now quite clear where these bots came from, if they disappeared when Yandex stopped working.
Despite the sharp decline, bot farms did not disappear completely. Andrii Kovalenko reminded that some of them operate through other cloud services and foreign proxies, so the effect of the strikes will likely be temporary. In any case, Yandex has options to navigate out of the situation, because, just as Ukrainian providers moved data to Europe, Russia could move data to China.
Already now the company, which, as it turned out, was the main channel for spreading Russian propaganda and destabilizing the world, says that its services are "gradually returning" to operation. In particular, allegedly restored are "Alice", Search, Maps, Taxi, and Mail. Work is also underway to restore Yandex Pay.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Трафік російських ботів упав до мінімуму після ударів по "Яндексу"". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Channel 24.
