AI-rewritten: This is a summary of an article from The Verge, rewritten by AI (Qwen, running locally) to make it easier to read. The facts come from the original article – read it for the full story.

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Recent drone strikes on Russian data centers have reportedly caused online bot traffic to drop sharply, according to a chart citing Cloudflare data. While many people interpret this decline as evidence that attacks disrupted Russian disinformation campaigns, reputed troll farm exposer antibot4navalny states the data "has nothing to do with social media." The chart actually measures requests from automated Yandex web crawlers, which are commonly used for search indexing and customer service rather than spreading harmful content.

Another chart shared by European Parliament member Tomáš Zdechovský claimed that activity around Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party plummeted after the attacks. Computer scientist Raphael Wimmer suspects this image is AI-generated because it includes a data point for October 15th, a future date. Wimmer notes the source remains unestablished and the original image does not reference the AfD party. He urged politicians and journalists to stop sharing unverified images.

Despite these digital disruptions, most Yandex-operated systems remain offline following the latest strike, including the Yandex Pay digital payment service. Users currently cannot transfer funds or make purchases through the platform. Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex Fintech, stated in a translated statement that they cannot yet provide a precise restoration timeline but promised to work until the service is fully restored.