Yandex outage: Cloudflare confirms what really happened with Russian bots

Cloudflare says claims that Russian bots vanished after Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex are partly misleading. After the strikes on Yandex data centers over the past week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said bot activity and political disinformation campaigns dropped on platforms like X. Social media repeated the narrative that Ukraine disrupted a massive bot operation. But Cloudflare’s report found bot traffic on its network was interrupted, while bot operators quickly migrated to other cloud providers, keeping campaigns running. Cloudflare also said it couldn’t determine whether any disruption affected social media manipulation specifically, though it left open the possibility.