Over the last 72 hours, the Internet has been overwhelmed with reports of something miraculous: that “Russian social media activity” had dropped dramatically following Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers.

It is true that Ukrainian drones knocked out three of Yandex’s data centers, in a solid blow to Russia’s economy and information processing capacity — at Sasovo on October 8, Kaluga on October 9 and Vladimir on October 11.

But then people started sharing charts that alleged that Russian “bot traffic” had collapsed to almost nothing. The trolls on social media, they claimed, had finally been unplugged.

It was a great story. The only problem? It isn’t true — or at least there is no quantifiable evidence (yet) that supports the claim. As we did last week following reports of plague in Irkutsk (remember that?), we built a live tracker to sort out facts from fiction. And we’ve made every effort to test the claims beyond the vibes. Those efforts have, so far, failed to produce any claims or data that support the “Russian Bot Miracle of 2026.” Here’s what we did find.