President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office now says he was referring to the general mood on social media as reported by some users, Olejnik said. That explanation differs from Zelenskyy's own words at the Warsaw Security Forum: “Because there were fewer bots.” Experts told BBC Verify there was no evidence the attacks significantly reduced Russia-linked bot networks. Olejnik said the automated traffic shown collapsing in viral charts was mostly Yandex's search crawlers, not social media influence accounts.
The strikes caused documented disruption to Yandex, Russia's dominant search engine and a provider of cloud and ride-hailing services. Its facilities in Ryazan, Kaluga and Vladimir were hit on Oct. 8, 9 and 11. Cloudflare measured a 99% drop in traffic from Yandex's network compared with the previous week as the Vladimir facility shut down, while ride-hailing, navigation and payment services suffered widespread outages.