Automated traffic from Yandex's network fell 94%, Cloudflare data show; Zelensky links this to social media bots, experts do not read the data that way
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
The drop in automated traffic has been measured, but the data do not show which programs stopped working; the link to social media is a statement by Zelensky that experts dispute.
According to Euronews, citing Cloudflare Radar, automated traffic from Yandex's network on Sunday, October 11, was about 94% below the mid-September average; RFE/L, citing the same data, writes that it fell after October 8 and approached zero on October 11. At the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that "when our strikes reached Yandex's data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms" because "there were fewer bots"; according to Euronews, several politicians in Europe and the US reported similar observations. Euronews notes that the Cloudflare data include legitimate automated traffic, such as search crawlers, and do not show whether bots linked to the Russian authorities were affected; reports of reduced activity around individual parties and accounts are not independently confirmed. According to RFE/L, a number of technical researchers believe the drop is mainly due to requests from Yandex's own services rather than accounts that spread disinformation. No official reaction from the Russian side to Zelensky's statement was found in the verified sources; according to RFE/L, the Kremlin has not commented on the strikes on Yandex.
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