YOUR SUDDENLY PLEASANT MENTIONS (The Daily Whatever Press)—This weekend I posted about Russia on X, and nobody with eight random numbers in their handle showed up to call me a globalist in a translation-app accent. I checked my replies. I checked them again. They were full of humans.
Humans! On Twitter! In 2026!
I have one server farm in Vladimir, Russia to thank, plus two of its cousins, and I am going to enjoy every minute of this.
The digital detox, returned to sender
Late last month, Russia started hitting Ukrainian data centers, and its Defense Ministry, which apparently hired a wellness influencer, called the strikes “a forced digital detox.”
Ukraine took the note, and thought, what a clever idea!
On October 8, drones set fire to Yandex’s data center in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, home to two of the company’s three AI supercomputers, Lyapunov and Chervonenkis. On October 9, drones partly knocked out the one in Kaluga. On October 11, Yandex confirmed its Vladimir data center, home of supercomputer number three, was “completely shut down due to a drone attack.” Volodymyr Zelensky summed it up on day one: “We hit back.”
Vladimir? I hardly know ’er!
The guys in my eighth grade gym class are dying over that one.
Yandex, for the uninitiated, is Russia’s Google, which makes it Russia’s Gmail, Russia’s Uber, Russia’s Spotify, Russia’s Alexa, and, as of this weekend, Russia’s single point of failure. When Vladimir went dark, more than 80 Yandex Cloud services stopped working, the YandexGPT API among them. The Alisa voice assistant went quiet. Yandex Go couldn’t get anybody a cab in Russia, Serbia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, or Armenia. And Yandex Cloud posted a status update on Telegram that I intend to have framed: “There are power interruptions in the ru-central1-a availability zone.”
Power interruptions! That’s one way to describe a building on fire.
Hahahaha.
The view from my mentions
I’m a human who uses Twitter, and I am telling you, it is different. The bald-eagle-avatar reply guys are gone. The pile-ons that used to land within ninety seconds of any post containing the word “Ukraine” haven’t landed. It feels like good Twitter again, the Fail Whale years, when the worst thing that could happen to you on the site was the site itself falling over.
And I’m not the only one who noticed.
“Without the vatnik bots at yandex twitter is peaceful again!” Darren J. Maher posted Sunday afternoon. “I couldn’t believe my eyes: my feed is (almost) empty of the dumb russian bots,” wrote a user named Oleks. On Saturday, @thatfellaVII kept it simple: “It sure has been nice here with half the russian bots gone.” Another user, @SilverFox235, asked the question all of us were thinking: could they finally say Russia shot down MH17 “without getting dozens of russian bots in my mentions?” And @aunty_shirley wrote a whole Pete Seeger parody about it, because when the bots go quiet, the folk singers come out.
On Saturday, @TobbeG3 showed up in the replies of the White House’s own Rapid Response 47 account to report it was “extremely quiet from Russian bots and MAGA propaganda bots today.” Both kinds! In one weekend! @Danny_Bucket figured it “must be a quieter day for @BotFinderUK.” And @jerzydejm asked, with all the wonder of a kid on Christmas morning, “do you notice x is so much nicer when yandex gets drone striked?”
I do, jerzy. I really, really do.
The mood on my timeline is the Ewok party at the end of Return of the Jedi: everybody drumming on stormtrooper helmets, nobody worried about the cleanup. I declined my own bar mitzvah, and I would dance a hora for a server farm in Vladimir getting blasted to hell.
Then there’s the chart. Cloudflare Radar tracks automated traffic by network, and Yandex’s network has a number, AS13238. On October 8, security researcher Jeremiah Fowler posted that its bot traffic had already dropped to 49.8 percent of its peak. By Sunday morning, veteran political reporter Jamie Dupree posted the line falling all the way to zero, with a note: “Might have an impact right before the November elections.” That post has more than 250,000 views. The same Cloudflare dashboard, as screenshotted by an Anonymous account, listed that network’s traffic as 99.6 percent bots.
Ninety-nine point six percent!
Whoooooo!
A little history for dessert: in 2012, Twitter made Yandex its real-time search partner. Fourteen years later, Ukraine finalized the divorce. Elon Musk, you may recall, promised in 2022 that he would “defeat the spam bots or die trying.” Elon, buddy, you’re alive, and the guys who got it done fly drones out of Ukraine for a living.
Force majeure, baby
Yandex, meanwhile, is coping like a champ. On October 10, between fires, it updated its user agreement to list drone and missile attacks as force majeure. The Russian outlet Verstka also found that Yandex had blurred all four of its cloud data centers on its own map app, which is a bold privacy move when three of the four are currently on the evening news. The stock fell more than 3 percent the day Sasovo burned. Somewhere a Moscow day trader is asking Alisa what to do, and Alisa is saying nothing at all.
Kremlin, if you’re reading this, and with Alisa down somebody is going to have to read it to you out loud: take your time with the repairs. Really. No rush. With your bots offline, the only strangers left in my DMs should be gay men with ambitious mustaches, which is the Twitter I signed up for.
Yippee-ki-yay, motherfuckers.
Russia’s Defense Ministry promised Ukraine a forced digital detox, and Ukraine mailed it straight back to Vladimir. For one glorious weekend, Vladimir Putin’s bot army couldn’t get a word in on my timeline, and I’ve never enjoyed a quiet Sunday more.
Slava Ukraini, and….enjoy the silence.
Thanks for stopping by!
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But how will all the political influencers get all their traffic? 😱
Love your essay! I don’t do x so I didn’t know, but the takedown is wonderful news!! I hope Ukraine can put them out again!