For four days in October, some of the loudest voices online went quiet. Between October 8 and 11, Ukrainian drones knocked out three Yandex data centres and took more than 80 Russian cloud services offline, including YandexGPT, Yandex’s AI model. In the same days, people in the US, Germany, France and Britain noticed the pro-Trump cheerleading, the AfD boosting, the anti-Ukraine pile-ons and the “concerned moms” warning about electric cars thinning out. Kelli Klymenko, an artist with 286,000 followers, usually gets 50 to 75 hostile accounts on a pro-Ukraine post. That week she got three.
Yandex is often called “Russia’s Google”. It runs search, maps, taxis and a cloud business, and it builds YandexGPT, a large language model it sells to developers. Every report of the quiet concerns the content Kremlin networks push, and every one began in the week those servers went dark. The angry strangers in those replies were running on Russian infrastructure.
Three data centres in four days
| Date | Site | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 8 | Sasovo, Ryazan region (12 MW) | Fire and full shutdown at the site holding two of Yandex’s three AI supercomputers |
| Oct 9 | Kaluga region, the largest campus (63 MW, 3,800+ racks) | Several modules knocked out; site partly disabled |
| Oct 11 | Vladimir (roughly 50-56 MW) | Operations completely halted and Yandex Cloud went down |
The megawatt figures come from United24. They measure how much power each site draws, which is a rough guide to how many servers it runs.
After the first strike, Yandex said it could not promise the Sasovo hardware would ever run again. It told PRM and Tech Insider:
“At this stage, we cannot confirm whether the equipment in our data center in Sasovo can be restored.”
Yandex said the Kaluga campus was partly put out of action. It said the Vladimir data centre was completely shut down.
The cloud went down at Vladimir. UNN lists more than 80 affected services, including Compute Cloud, Managed Service for Kubernetes, Cloud Functions, Yandex AI Studio, SpeechKit and the YandexGPT API. The Maltese Herald separately reports disruption to Yandex’s “AI tools” and its AI chatbot. Tom’s Hardware counted at least 84 services offline on Yandex Cloud’s status page. NetBlocks measured Yandex Cloud traffic at about 30% of normal. Across Russia, people lost taxis, navigation, and payment and banking apps, PRM reports.
Russia started this exchange. Since late September it had struck at least eight major Kyiv data centres, according to The Moscow Times, and it called the result a “forced digital detox,” as The Maltese Herald also reports. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy put it plainly, via UNN: “They struck our data centers, so we responded.” The Herald reports that he described the strikes as a symmetrical response.
The swarms went quiet on Facebook, X and Telegram
Klymenko gives the most detailed account. By her count, her two latest Ukraine posts drew nearly 14,000 combined views, many of them from people who don’t follow her. They drew three hostile commenters all day, against the 50 to 75 a single post usually brings. She also says her reach recovered over the past three or four days, after months of what she believes was coordinated mass reporting.
Other people reported the same thing on their own, on different platforms and in different countries:
- Garry Kasparov, on X: “The Russian troll bots in my own feed have dropped dramatically already,” quoted by EUAlive.
- Le Parisien, in France: “observers reported fewer right wing reactions on X,” as cited by Fudzilla, which also covers quieter pro-Trump, AfD and Reform UK activity.
- Analysts cited by PRM: activity from some Telegram accounts critical of Ukraine “decreased sharply,” PRM reports.
- Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský, on X, Oct 11: activity around Germany’s AfD fell sharply. “So much talk about German patriotism… then the connection from Russia goes down,” he wrote. The chart he posted gives no source, so its numbers are left out here.
The Maltese Herald adds that there was less pro-MAGA content, less pro-AfD and pro-Palestine content, and fewer fake stories about the French presidential election. On Bluesky, Gavin Shoebridge put it most memorably:
“Crazy how a huge Russian data centre going offline coincides with fewer concerned moms from Arkansas questioning the safety of electric cars.”, Gavin Shoebridge, Bluesky, Oct 12
This was not only about Ukraine. What went quiet was pro-Trump and MAGA content in the US, AfD boosting in Germany, Reform UK support in Britain, fake stories about France’s presidential election, pro-Palestine posts, and the “concerned moms” warning Americans off electric cars. The reports came from the US, Germany, France and Britain, in the same week. The topics have nothing in common except that Kremlin networks push all of them.
That is what the swarm is for. Meta’s own threat report names the US as the country most targeted by covert influence operations and Russia as their most frequent source. A swarm of fake locals makes a fringe position look like the neighbourhood’s view, and makes someone like Klymenko look outnumbered on her own page. The US midterms are on November 3, three weeks away.
Historian Timothy Snyder has suggested that pro-Trump and pro-AfD bot activity “may have depended on Russian data centres.”
What Cloudflare’s 0.4% figure measures
The number that spread fastest, Cloudflare’s chart of automated traffic from Yandex’s network falling to 0.4% of its peak, counts Yandex’s own machines crawling the web. The evidence about the swarms is in the comment sections, from the people they target.
Why AI-run influence operations depend on servers
Meta’s data is more useful here. Its latest Adversarial Threat Report names Russia as the top source of the covert influence operations Meta disrupted: 53 networks, against 41 for Iran and 14 for China. It flags full-stack synthetic personas as a trend. It also describes Doppelganger, the Russian operation known for faking real news brands, splitting into smaller offshoots aimed at France, Germany, Hungary, Armenia, Moldova and the US. Three of those countries are among the places where people now report the quiet.
Where a fake account’s replies are written by a language model, they are written on someone’s servers. We have already seen an AI-run influence operation posing as Americans on X. An operation that writes its comments through an AI API goes silent when that API does, and the YandexGPT API was on the list of dead services.
The Maltese Herald reports that “Russian state-aligned media and propaganda sites experienced outages” after the strikes, and that some Russian outlets relying on Yandex Cloud were disrupted. It names none of them.
An operation that writes its comments through an AI API goes silent when that API does, and the YandexGPT API was on the list of dead services.
The outage could silence a fake crowd in two ways. One is a model writing the comments. The other is a staffed farm whose tools, proxies or connections sat on Yandex Cloud. Yandex LLC’s own traffic fell to 63% of normal, according to NetBlocks, and Tech Insider reports disruption reaching Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia. Either kind of operation would have lost its voice that week.
This site’s reading is that both explanations end in the same place. The crowd of “concerned moms from Arkansas” was running on Russian infrastructure, not posting from Arkansas. Readers who took it for public opinion paid for it, and so did people like Klymenko, who spent months shouting into replies built to drown them out.
The quiet will not last. PRM’s IT-market sources say Yandex is already buying replacement hardware abroad. When the servers come back, the swarm comes back with them: the same anti-Ukraine pile-ons, the same MAGA cheerleading, the same moms from Arkansas. This week showed where they were running.
Further Reading
- Ukrainian Drones Hit Yandex Data Center After Wave of Russian Attacks, The Moscow Times on the Sasovo strike and Russia’s earlier strikes on Kyiv data centres.
- Russia’s Yandex Says Data Center in Vladimir Shut Down After Drone Attack, Yandex confirms the Vladimir shutdown and the partial loss of Kaluga.
- Russia reports a major Yandex Cloud outage following an attack on a Yandex data center, UNN’s list of the 80+ affected cloud services, plus Zelenskyy’s quote.
- Russia’s Yandex under fire as drones hit third data center in four days, United24 on the capacity of each site and the local power cuts.
- Ukraine strikes Yandex third data center in 4 days, Tech Insider on Vladimir, Yandex’s Sasovo statement and the knock-on disruptions abroad.
- Russia’s Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes cripple multiple of ‘Russia’s Google’ data centers, Tom’s Hardware on the Cloudflare and NetBlocks figures.
- Yandex data center shuts down in Russia after attacks: activity of bots criticizing Ukraine and supporting AfD decreases, PRM on the Telegram drop, Zdechovský’s post and the repair timeline.
- Online Russian propaganda including pro-Trump and pro-AFD commentary goes down after Ukraine strikes Yandex data-centres, The Maltese Herald on which political content dropped and the propaganda-site outages.
- Ukraine strikes Russia’s data centres: will this reduce Kremlin’s online election meddling, EUAlive with Kasparov’s and Snyder’s views and its caveat on verification.
- Yandex strikes may have silenced far right bots, Fudzilla citing Le Parisien, and noting the pre-strike traffic dips.
- Did “Russian bot traffic” really disappear after Ukrainian strikes on Yandex servers?, The Verge on antibot4navalny’s reading of the Cloudflare chart.
- Kelli Klymenko-“Hello? Bots? Where you at?”, The artist’s first-hand Facebook account.
- Gavin Shoebridge on Bluesky, Oct 12, 2026, The “concerned moms from Arkansas” post and its replies.
- Meta Adversarial Threat Report, Second Half 2026, Meta’s count of covert influence networks by country and its notes on synthetic personas and Doppelganger.