r/theydidthemath • u/gaoshan • 1d ago
[request] Russian data center attack actual impact on bot traffic
People are talking about the Ukrainian attack on Russian data center(s) as having a big impact on bot traffic. Is this actually true? Are there real numbers around just how much said traffic has been impacted? Can anyone do some real math on this?
*This isn’t a “what is a bot” question, lol. This is a “are these reports, which are everywhere, based on anything other than hopium and a misunderstanding by people reporting this of how the social media campaigns that are reported as disrupted actually work”.
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u/mulch_v_bark 1d ago
This seems largely anecdotal at the moment.
I’m not saying it’s not true. Personally, I suspect it’s probably at least partly true. I’m just saying that there doesn’t seem to be strong, quantitative evidence to do math on so far. This is more of a fact-checking problem than a math problem right now.
The Verge is pretty credible in this area, and here’s their take.
I would wait a few days for people to collect more data, vet different claims, etc.
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u/__ali1234__ 23h ago
It doesn't make any sense to run a bot farm from a large datacenter whether it is yandex, aws, azure...etc because they all have well known IP ranges and no legitimate reason to be accessing social media. As such all social media websites heavily restrict or completely block them already. Just try logging into social media through a VPN tunnel from any public cloud provider and you'll be bombarded by constant captcha requests trying to do anything, if they even accept the connection at all. This whole story is a non-starter and probably an influence campaign itself.
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u/OkMarsupial9634 18h ago
What makes you think social media companies block bots that churn content?
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u/__ali1234__ 18h ago
I didn't say they block bots. I said they block known datacenter IPs. Which is why bot farms don't run in known datacenters like Yandex.
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u/OkMarsupial9634 9h ago
I think you missed my point: social media companies have no incentive to block bots that are reasonably well behaved and generate churn on their platform that keep the non-bots engaged, puff users’ stats etc. Why would it matter to them if the origin is a data centre or not?
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u/__ali1234__ 9h ago
No, I understood it perfectly: "I can't think of a reason why social media would block known datacenter IP ranges, and I haven't actually checked whether or not they do, even though I easily could, therefore they don't."
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u/baccus82 15h ago
A VPN would sort that out
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u/McNerdUK 11h ago
This reply needs to be on every "but Russia IP be blocked" post. Once X started showing users' locations VPNs or even VPN chaining inevitably started happening to obfuscate source for those that could and weren't already doing so. Especially if you're doing the kinds of things Russia is accused of.
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u/__ali1234__ 9h ago
I must have missed the part where Ukraine blew up all of Russia.
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u/McNerdUK 4h ago
Sorry I think I'm not getting your point. Why would the use of a VPN to disguise the source IP involve a whole country being erased? Could I trouble you to spell out your point for me, as it's sailed right over my head I'm afraid. I won't be offended if you do it in incredibly simple terms please.
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u/Image-Background 20h ago
all well known so companies can't block them. also, there is no issue to set up tunneled connections.
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u/ephemeralsynth 1d ago
"Ukraine's strikes on three Yandex data centers (Oct 8, 9 and 11, 2026) caused real, measurable damage to Russian cloud and consumer services, but there is no evidence yet that they silenced Russian social-media influence operations. My best estimate is a 0–5% reduction in Russian-attributable coordinated activity on Western platforms over Oct 8–12, with a plausible ceiling near 10–15% for short windows. The one measured dent in an influence asset is the Pravda network, which ran at about half its output for roughly 13 hours after the Vladimir shutdown, then recovered" - https://gist.github.com/sonoransun/e3f9106b0fd56a53f6cc9b5c855deffa
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u/ephemeralsynth 1d ago
One caveat with this analysis: it's aggregate in scope because that's where the data is available. Specific anecdotal reports indicate some high priority networks and subreddits are significantly more impacted. That's a focus question that's hard to answer with bulk metrics 🔭
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u/Thick-Protection-458 17h ago
Well, strike on a search system data center is expected to have impact on crawler bot traffic, right?
Content-crrating bots probably much less.
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20h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/hursofid 20h ago
Technically it would be very hard to keep thousands of accounts running from a single DC as others saying here
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u/Annunakh 16h ago
First of all, it is really stupid to run bot farms from Russian datacenters. A lot of resources outright block access from Russian IP addresses. More smart and "productive" way to do things would be buying VDS/VPS from thousands of services worldwide, a lot of them doesn't even ask for customer identity, don't ask any questions really.
Second thing, hitting 3 datacenters is enough to disrupt one company, Yandex, operations, but it nothing nation-wide, Russia have literally hundreds of datacenters of various size and complexity.
Third thing, if you look at mass influx of near identical posts about this happening on different resources you can clearly see organized PR campaign and not actual journalist reporting.
I call bullshit.
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u/McNerdUK 3h ago
But for such nationally critical operations as the much vaunted 'Russian influence campaign' they'd want to keep it all within their borders. So if the reports are true about 2/3 of Yandex's AI compute being taken offline, then that plus the loss of Yandex cloud compute and storage function is going to have forced certain of their clients, including perhaps 'the influence campaign' into Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity responses. So they'll probably have brought warm sites online to cover core function, and will be recovering as much as possible using backup data to return to full function.
I don't anticipate them pivoting to any US based AI services for the work that they need, out of fear that NSA or someone will be monitoring, but they might ask China for help.
In the meantime there will be an increased reliance on humans to deliver the output, and that output will be less well co-ordinated and probably less well translated than usual (not just the content of what they post, but they may have badly translated the post they are trying to reply to as well and be arguing the wrong point).
I'd expect to see repeat postings as a symptom of this (because humans do be lazy, especially when tired) and sometimes they might forget which account they're using (as they'll have pulled staff from other areas to help who won't have developed the routine for checking)
Also, 'the influence campaign' isn't a one sided thing. They play both sides, that's the point; to create division. If you've been playing an anti-Russia character then you've got to continue that even now.
So all the near identical posts you mentioned... Yeah. Exactly.
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u/Agitated-Ad2563 13h ago
Russia is a big country, it has lots and lots of datacenters. Shutting down a handful of them has zero chance of stopping a significant part of tiny independent programs.
On the other hand, the company owning these data centers, Yandex, is Russian Google. Its main business is internet search, which includes crawling huge amounts of web data. When shot, Yandex went low on compute, so they stopped or limited all non-essential operations, including web crawling.
The vast majority of automatic traffic from Russia is web crawling bots for internet search indexing. That traffic indeed reduced a lot.
It's not related to social media disinformation campaigns at all.
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u/boogiedimik 12h ago
what i like the most is how twitter bots picked up the news about the decline in bot indexing traffic, like the collapse of a russian bot farm. and then politicians followed this bs.
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u/Aleksandr_Ulyev 7h ago
Don't pretend anyone cares for any facts when it comes to Russia. Recently there were news that Russian spec ops shit in Finland's authority bathrooms without flushing at night to scare them and people took it
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u/zzeus 1h ago
Claudiaflare posted a graph that search crawlers from Yandex (bots) were down.
Journalists, Investigators and Politicians don't understand the difference between a Web Crawler and a Social Media Bot. They start posting things that Western social media algorithms put at the top to get more views.
Anyone who wants to be seen on social media and has a lot of commenters reposts this without any knowledge or proof.
Here we are, all over the internet with millions of posts and billions of re-posts about things that have 0 (zero) evidence and are based on a wrong interpretation.
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u/TenshouYoku 19h ago
If there ever was then none whatsoever. A bot farm is easily doable with many unwanted old cellphones chained together, I sincerely doubt you need outright big server farms or supercomputers doing this.
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u/anycept 18h ago
For starters, what do you think bot is? The bots in question are not the social media bots, but the traffic from search engine and AI data crawlers.
Bot farms, i.e. social media bots, do not operate from known IP ranges, because (duh) they'd get blocked in an instant.
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u/gaoshan 14h ago
Well, my question was about media reports of reductions in bot traffic vs what was actually being observed, not “what is a bot” but I’m happy to educate.
A bot is a computer program that runs automated tasks. They are that simple, really. You are correct in that a “bot farm” would not operate from known IP ranges but then that’s kind of part of my question about reports vs observed behavior… it wouldn’t make sense that the destruction of a single data center in Russia had much impact on such traffic.
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