Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out at least three airstrikes targeting datacentres belonging to the Russian search engine giant Yandex. Reports indicate that at least two of these datacentres sustained significant damage, with Telegram footage appearing to show one on fire. Yandex acknowledged the strikes, and Russian media reported that several websites were affected by the downed datacentres.
On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested the strikes had reduced Russia's extensive disinformation operations, stating: “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms. There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations.”
However, experts suggest President Zelenskyy may have overstated the impact. While some viral social media graphs indicated a decline in bot activity, these graphs are reportedly unrelated to Russian disinformation. Experts tracking approximately 40 disinformation networks globally have observed no drop in the volume of posts from these networks, noting that Yandex datacentres have no practical connection to social media bot farms.
Data from Cloudflare, which monitors global internet traffic, showed a decline in activity from bots associated with the Yandex network on October 8 and October 11, corresponding to two of the strike dates. This decline was attributed to Yandex’s web crawlers, which are software making automated web requests to index websites, rather than automated social media troll accounts. Internet infrastructure experts explain that serious bot operations typically use distributed methods like residential connections and phone farms, which are not susceptible to airstrikes on datacentres.