Ukraine’s Zelenskyy Claims Strikes on Russian Data Centers Silenced Social Media Bots

Tech News Ukraine’s Zelenskyy Claims Strikes on Russian Data Centers Silenced Social Media Bots Yandex's automated traffic fell by 94%, but that probably reflects widespread service outages rather than bot posting rates. 12, 2026, pm ET Reading time 3 minutes Zelenskyy is seen among Ukrainian weapons as he touts drone advances. © PresidentGovUa / YouTube Read Later Read Later Comments (15) The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war has mixed the digital and the kinetic in unprecedented and often terrifying ways, including widespread use of suicide drones, software orchestration of the front lines, and the weaponization of commercial ad data. So it’s hardly surprising that Ukraine has struck data centers run by Russia-based tech giant Yandex (sort of a Facebook/Google/Uber hybrid) three times in the last few days. The most recent strike, on Oct. 11, reportedly completely disabled a facility in the Vladimir region east of Moscow. The result was widespread outages of Russian internet services, both within and outside the country. That said, automated traffic is a huge umbrella that includes everything from search crawlers to uptime-monitoring tools. Euronews also noted that social media users in other countries, like Germany, the UK, and US, also claimed to witness a decrease in bots; this was apparently based on vibes. Online “prediction market” Polymarket also tweeted that “Activity on several major U. S. political subreddits plunges following attacks on Russian data centers,” though that assertion didn’t come with evidence. Insisting that online rivals are secretly bots is a time-honored posting tactic, one of the few bipartisan ones left—it’s pretty hard to find a front-page Reddit thread that doesn’t have at least a couple comments insisting that “the bots are really out today.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a U. S. government-funded broadcaster that primarily serves foreign audiences, noted that technical experts have pointed out the supposed drop in automated traffic is from Yandex’s own search crawler hitting websites with AS13238 HTTP requests. As a result, it does not indicate anything about the broader volume of Russian internet traffic or what it contains. Finally, that stat only accounts for Russian web traffic that’s already been categorized as automated. Russian cyber adversaries would presumably make at least some kind of cursory effort to obfuscate their traffic, including . Some of the claims appear to conflate data centers with Russian “troll farms” such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which became well-known following a 2015 expose.