Press note · Qriton · 12 October 2026
"The Russian bots vanished"? The data says otherwise
In brief: the strikes on Yandex data centres (8–11 October) stopped Yandex's network, not the pro-Russian propaganda networks aimed at Romania and the Republic of Moldova. The Cloudflare chart circulating as "the Russian bots vanished" measures automated traffic from Yandex's network, mostly its search crawler, not propaganda accounts.
What the data shows
- Russia as a whole: automated HTTP traffic from all of Russia in the Vladimir outage window (11 October, 01–09 UTC) was 0.94 of its usual level (Cloudflare Radar); the bot share of Russia's traffic only moved from 51% to 47%.
- What fell: from Yandex's network, 100% of the traffic from self-identifying bots is YandexBot, the search engine's crawler; across Russia its share fell from 99.8% to 79% during the outage.
- The rest of Russian hosting: Selectel, Beget, Aeza and other Russian cloud networks, where bot farms ordinarily run, had normal automated traffic; only Yandex collapsed.
- TikTok: the watched Romanian and Russian accounts, including Călin Georgescu supporters, published 340 new videos from 63 accounts after the Vladimir outage, against 328 from 52 accounts the day before.
- Pravda and Telegram: the Pravda network (including romania.news-pravda.com and md.news-pravda.com) and the automated Telegram channels published normally during the outage.
- Where the networks sit: Pravda on Cloudflare; the RT mirrors and News Front on Russian telecom networks. None depends on Yandex Cloud; Yandex only receives the data about readers.
What we did not measure
X and Facebook. We can neither confirm nor rule out lower activity by some accounts there. We can only say that the explanation "Yandex went down, so the bots vanished" fits nothing we measured.
The same conclusion: antibot4navalny, which has tracked Russian state troll farms for years, as reported by The Verge, 12 October 2026.
Data available on request to journalists and researchers: qriton.com/contact