Yandex bot traffic plunges 99% after drone strike on data center
Yandex bot traffic down 99% after data center attack
A drone strike on a Yandex data center reportedly cut the company's bot traffic by 99%, sparking debate over whether this includes its web crawlers or Russian troll farm activity. Commenters note a possible drop in hateful tweets and pro-AfD posts, but many demand empirical evidence. The incident highlights the vulnerability of centralized infrastructure and the difficulty of attributing online influence operations.
This is a great example of a headline that has two completely different meanings to two different groups. Many are (incorrectly) interpreting 'bot traffic' to mean something like "fake users on social media that leave comments and 'likes' supporting right-wing posts". But Yandex is like Russia's Google. Both Google and Yandex need to scrape the internet in order to index it in their search.
- ron_k
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50041619
- gritzko
This graph shows that Yandex Web crawler farm was hit. The other option, it was shut down to accommodate more critical services that got hit. (I worked for Yandex 20 years ago, one crawler guy was in the same room.) Not sure if troll farms got affected in any way, that is a different business entirely, no overlap.
The interesting aspect is this: Yandex was taken from its owners semi-consensually. Similarly, the original owner of the troll farms was blown up in a business jet. He staged a mutiny cause his dirty bloody business was about to be taken from him non-consensually. Some other large non-consensual takeovers unfold for 5 years, soon 6.
What an appetite!
- sznio
I don't use X myself, but my friends told me there's a noticable reduction in hateful tweets, at least in the Polish sphere. Much less comments blaming Ukrainians for everything wrong with the world.
- xvxvx
For those claiming a drop in hate speech on social media, I’ve yet to see examples of this. Plenty of claims, no examples.
- SXX
I hope at least fellow IT people can recognize that "social media bots" are not running on Yandex datacenters neither they have IP adresses from Russia.
This is just not how social media botting works. If you try to "bot" facebook, instagram or any major social network via browser from datacenter IP let alone ones from Russia you'll soon get all your accounts banned.
Social media are botted via apps on mobile phones set in large farms; read: thousands of mobile devices. They either jailbroken or have some advance automation.
Neither they use Russian IP. Instead they go for residential proxies kindly provided by Israeli firms where bandwidth cost a leg, but it worth it. Or they just use their own botnets instead.
- yokoprime
An important detail for those, like me, who have't kept up with the news: this was drone strike against a yandex data center, not cyber attack.
- kreyenborgi
Well thats one way to deal with scrapers
- nomilk
This is a great example of a headline that has two completely different meanings to two different groups.
Many are (incorrectly) interpreting 'bot traffic' to mean something like "fake users on social media that leave comments and 'likes' supporting right-wing posts". (something Russian bots were accused of during the 2016 US presidential election)
But Yandex is like Russia's Google. Both Google and Yandex need to scrape the internet in order to index (no indexing means the site would not appear in search results).
So Yandex datacenters going down meant so too did their 'bots' that visit sites to index them. Nothing to do with 'bots' as per the Russia collusion allegations a la the 2016 election.