El País: since Thursday, Ukrainian drones have hit three Yandex data centres. “The Kremlin’s Google.” Taxi, Pay, temporarily down. Zelensky said the bombings disabled Russian bots. The paper’s headline puts websites down and bots. BBC Verify puts the question: social-media bots, or search crawlers? The answer is not the same as the headline.

Ukraine has struck three of Yandex’s five data centres since 8 October, the BBC writes, in response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian internet hubs. The second strike, on Thursday, led the company to say it was struggling to keep services up. Lawfare names the places: Sasovo, Kaluga, Vladimir. El País puts them on the outskirts of Moscow. Three cities and a periphery. It is not the same map. Reuters, as taken up: the Kremlin acknowledged the service problems. That is the network. It is not a photographed troll farm.

Cloudflare charts circulated: automated traffic from Yandex’s network, collapsed. Lawfare: automated HTTP requests from AS13238, down to 0.3% of the recent maximum on 11 October, against 88.2% a week earlier. Cloudflare told the BBC: the data include all automated requests, including indexing. It is not necessarily bot behaviour on social platforms. Mikhail Klimarev: Yandex crawls the internet once a day for search; it is plausible they switched the crawlers off when computing power collapsed.

Zelensky, at the Warsaw Security Forum, according to the BBC: less hate, less division, fewer provocations, because fewer bots. His office, on 13 October, still to the BBC: he was talking about atmosphere, not a fall in bot activity. Researchers at dTeam: no traffic change from known Russian clusters. Storm-1516, Matryoshka, still active on Tuesday. Snopes: the claim that MAGA or AfD went quiet because of bot farms, unproven. A Czech MEP pinned a post with millions of views; he later said he had not presented it as established fact.

El País widens the frame: data centres as targets. Iran, 28 February, three AWS sites in the Emirates and Bahrain, in the paper’s account; an effect in the Gulf, then in AWS zones, including the Americas. Some data, unrecoverable by 15 September, AWS said there. Colonel Ángel Gómez de Ágreda: multibillion-dollar investments, legitimate targets if they support operations. Tomáš Foltýn, ESET: physical distance does not insulate. That is the thesis. It is not the Yandex list.

Until a troll measurement, what remains is Taxi down and a crawler chart. After a measurement, what remains is the atmosphere Zelensky says he sees. Between them, a word, “bot”, that fills a headline more easily than a server in Kaluga.

Image: WikiFido, Yandex head office, Moscow, 26 May 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The photograph is of the headquarters, not the struck sites in Sasovo, Kaluga or Vladimir.

Sources consulted: Websites down and bots disabled: The unexpected consequences of bombing data centers — El País; Is Zelensky right to say data centre strikes have taken down Russian bots? — BBC Verify.