#bots

This follows last week's thread on Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers. What's new is a report from Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation, covered by UNITED24 Media: it tracked 22,664 messages from 5,201 accounts showing signs of inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Telegram between October 6 and 12. After the October 8 strike on the Sasovo data center, messages fell from 4,032 to 660 in a day (83.6%), then recovered and passed pre-strike levels by October 10 and 11. After the reported shutdown of a Vladimir data center, they fell again by 42.6% on October 12.

The most-upvoted replies take political shots or say Reddit has felt calmer; one widely upvoted reply notes that the earlier, widely shared drop was in Yandex's search crawler traffic, not spam bots. About 38,600 upvotes in an 18-million-member community.

The post links Tom's Hardware's report that, after Ukrainian strikes knocked out Yandex data centers in Sasovo and Kaluga, Cloudflare measured bot traffic from Yandex's network falling to 0.4% of its two-week peak, and NetBlocks reported Yandex Cloud traffic at 30% of normal. The report says the strikes respond to Russian attacks on Kyiv data centers. Top replies, with about 17,000 and 14,000 upvotes, celebrated the drop in Russian bot traffic. The post drew about 82,000 upvotes; the same story also ranked in r/cybersecurity.