A coordinated Ukrainian drone strike targeted multiple large Russian data centres and knocked significant capacity offline, including key Yandex infrastructure that handles over 70% of Russia’s search traffic. The outages disrupted everyday services - banking apps, online transactions and ride-hailing - and sharply reduced automated web traffic originating from Yandex’s network. Cloudflare-linked data cited by analysts shows automated HTTP requests from that network collapsed to roughly 0.4% of recent peaks, effectively removing a major source of Russia-hosted bot activity from social platforms.
That removal has immediate information-warfare consequences: researchers tracking influence operations report that Russia-linked networks such as Storm-1516 and numerous far-right, bot-amplified accounts saw impressions and engagement fall from millions to mere thousands. Those shifts matter ahead of high-stakes political moments - analysts note bots previously accounted for an estimated 21-29% of activity on Twitter in the US - and come amid wider escalation, including recent Russian strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure and geopolitical moves like a diesel deal between Putin and Trump. Ukrainian leadership framed the strikes as having reduced online hate and division, while the duration and recovery of Yandex services will determine how lasting the impact on social media ecosystems and campaign messaging proves to be.
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