Russian bot activity fell 83.6% after Yandex data center strikes, then rebounded

A Ukrainian monitoring report says suspected Russian bot accounts sharply reduced their activity after strikes damaged Yandex data centers, but their message volume rebounded within two days. The Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), which is attached to Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, dated its report October 15, 2026.

Using Osavul, analysts tracked 22,664 messages from 5,201 accounts across 26 topics on Ukrainian Facebook and Telegram between October 6 and 12. On October 8, after a strike and fire shut down Yandex’s Sasovo data center, daily messages fell from 4,032 to 660, a drop of 83.6%. Active accounts fell from 1,526 to 258. Telegram activity declined 90%, while Facebook activity fell 79.5%.

Messages rose to 2,231 on October 9, then reached 4,585 on October 10 and 4,711 on October 11—above the pre-strike level. A second strike, on October 11, halted Yandex’s Vladimir site, the company said. Messages fell 42.6% the next day, from 4,711 to 2,704. The report’s monitoring period ends October 12, so it does not show whether activity recovered after that dip.

The CCD also recorded no activity drop on October 9, when a strike partially disrupted Yandex’s Kaluga campus. The reported timing is consistent with infrastructure disruptions affecting the accounts, but does not prove that connection. Separately, Cloudflare data indicates that most automated requests from Yandex’s network were verified search crawlers, not social media accounts. The evidence supports a brief disruption, rather than the disappearance of the bots.