On 11 October, Polish military analyst Jarosław Wolski stated that online support for the German party «Alternative for Germany» had fallen by 56 per cent following attacks on Yandex’s data centres. The company confirmed damage to three facilities and disruptions to some of its services; however, there is no independent data linking these events to a decline in political activity on social media.
Briefly about the main points
- Volsky stated that the AfD’s online support rating had fallen by 56%.
- «Yandex has confirmed damage to its data centres in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir.
- Cloudflare Radar recorded a drop in visible traffic to Yandex Cloud of approximately 33%.
- Volsky’s assessment methodology and the account data have not been made public.
What exactly did the Polish analyst say?
Yaroslav Volsky in a post on X wrote that after attacks on Yandex’s infrastructure« There are now fewer accounts on social media which, in his view, were inciting Ukrainians and Poles against one another. This referred, in particular, to profiles posing as Polish users and spreading anti-Ukrainian messages, as well as accounts allegedly linked to anti-Polish content.
The analyst also reported a fall in the online support figure AfD on 56% and a significant reduction in activity in support of the American MAGA movement. These claims constitute an attributional assessment by Volsky: the publicly available post does not cite any data sources, methodology, timeframe, list of platforms or criteria used to classify the accounts.
What consequences of the attacks has Yandex confirmed?«
On the night of 8 October, an attack was launched on the company’s data centre in Sasovo Ryazan Oblast. According to Yandex, the facility was seriously damaged and brought to a complete standstill.
On 9 October, part of the server infrastructure data centre in Kaluga has broken down. During the night of 10–11 October, a facility in Vladimir was damaged, and its operations were suspended. Yandex also reported that some of its services were unavailable and that there were disruptions; according to the company, it will take some time to restore the systems.
What the network traffic monitoring revealed
Cloudflare Radar reported that, following the incident in Sasovo, Yandex Cloud traffic visible to the Cloudflare network was, on average, approximately 33% lower than usual. NetBlocks, for its part, recorded significant disruptions to connectivity for the Yandex and Yandex Cloud networks.
These metrics describe the technical consequences of incidents, but are of limited value when it comes to assessing political campaigns. Cloudflare Radar reflects only the portion of internet traffic visible to its global network, rather than the entire Russian internet or all social media platforms.
