- The source reports that a Ukrainian drone attack halted Russian data centers. Over the past week, most Yandex systems still appear offline, and Yandex Pay is blocked for transfers, balance checks and payments. Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex fintech, could not say when service would be restored.
- A chart circulating on social media cited Cloudflare data and showed only activity related to Yandex services. antibot4navalny, known for exposing bot farms, claimed the chart measured requests from Yandex's automated web crawler; this is that account's claim.
- According to Cloudflare, overall bot activity in Russia did not change much before and after the data center attack. A chart on AfD shared by a member of the European Parliament was questioned by computer scientist Raphael Wimmer over suspected AI generation. Its source could not be confirmed, and he pointed out that it includes data dated October 15, which is in the future.
The part where a politician copied a graph with a future date without checking the source is what I find most bitter. If the graph measures Yandex crawler requests as the original description says, it's hard to read it as a drop in all bot activity across Russia. Still, this reading is antibot4navalny's claim, so it's hard to treat it as a confirmed fact. Before sharing, have you ever checked what the chart is actually measuring?