YANDEX TRAFFIC COLLAPSES—USERS REPORT RUSSIAN POLITICAL BOTS GOING QUIET
Something changed across the political internet after Ukrainian drones struck three major Yandex data centers—and people across several countries noticed it.
Users in the United States, Germany and Britain began reporting fewer hostile, repetitive and apparently automated political responses. The change was noticed particularly around accounts promoting Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, Germany’s AfD and Britain’s Reform UK. Some users even conducted informal “bot tests” by posting subjects that would ordinarily attract waves of aggressive replies, only to receive far fewer responses.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the apparent change directly.
“When our strikes reached Yandex data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” he said. “There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots.”
Cloudflare data confirms that Yandex’s automated online activity suffered a dramatic collapse. Traffic originating from the company’s AS13238 network fell by approximately 94% after the strikes, briefly approaching zero
The decline followed Ukrainian attacks on Yandex facilities in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir. The Vladimir center was completely shut down, while cloud services and other digital infrastructure were disrupted. The Sasovo facility also housed two of the three supercomputers used to develop Yandex’s artificial-intelligence model
The Cloudflare chart measures automated requests from Yandex’s network, including its search-engine crawlers; it does not identify individual political accounts. Social-media companies have not released their own account-level figures, leaving much of the political decline documented through the experiences of users themselves.
What is established is that Ukraine struck three critical centers belonging to Russia’s largest technology company. Yandex’s automated traffic then collapsed, while users across several countries simultaneously reported fewer hostile accounts, fewer provocations and noticeably quieter political discussions.
The numbers show what happened to Yandex. The sudden silence elsewhere speaks for itself—and readers can decide what they believe that silence means.