Buried lede:

>across Cloudflare's network, there was no evidence that the strikes knocked social media manipulation offline or otherwise disrupted malicious activity on the Internet.

This directly refutes the popular memes going around that russian trolls magically went offline because of the attack.

Does Cloudflare have much if anything to do with X/Twitter and Facebook/Instagram and TikTok, or even Reddit?

Presumably these bots make up a very small percentage of traffic in comparison to how much they make up in terms of comments.

And I doubt they have visibility on the most popular social networks.

The reason these bots are able to succeed is because the average person comments and votes so little that there's huge volatility between a power user and an average user. Power users are also not that rare, so it's hard to determine who's a power user and who's a bot (though most power users probably are bots).

You can make up a significant portion of comments and votes (especially on a topic) with a VERY small amount of the total viewing traffic.

The popular memes that were based on people's assumptions or guesses or stories based on... cloudflare own tweets!

https://x.com/cloudflareradar/status/2108122893028671604

https://x.com/CloudflareRadar/status/2110113211059994638

Which cloudflare also doesn't mention, that their vague and misleading tweet was responsible for these rumors that they are now trying to quash too. Tweets starting October 8th and continuing. That they're getting around to being like, yeah guys that data didn't mean that a week later.

This is how "news" and "facts" work in 2026.

Anyone that actually uses Cloudflare and manages their own bot traffic saw those graphs getting passed around and cringed. It has been an interesting thing to watch though as it was disseminated, echoed, and remixed with all sorts of "evidence" of this or that engagement dropping.

Russian state actors and propaganda networks literally using Yandex's ASN is like the CIA calling you from a payphone in the lobby of Langley.

Now you could say that parts of their infrastructure were hosted in there, and I'm sure it was, but the "bot" traffic narrative was pretty stupid.

Additionally,

> Following the reported strikes, bot traffic from Yandex.Cloud fell about 40%. … Cloudflare customer blocks on Yandex.Cloud traffic also fell 70% during the event period, suggesting that proportionately less malicious traffic was even hitting the Cloudflare WAF from this ASN

But the memes keep rolling. 57 channels and nothing on.

Yeah, it contradicted my intuition as a developer. If you take down a data center it isn't gone forever. The development team does not live there. Even if it's poorly backed up they're going to rebuild it.

No, it describes that Cloudflare was unable to identify that they have or haven't. The lack of evidence is not proof of absence.

I am in a couple political discussion groups and it was really curious how the traditional right-wing posters sort of disappeared right around the same time. There are several that people had suspected of being some type of plant that just were suddenly not posting any more and still haven't come back. No idea if it was related but the timing was so close that it raised a few eyebrows.

Not really, Cloudflare is talking about a different type of bot, one that scrapes the web.

Whereas social media users are talking about an entirely different type of bot which is injecting manufactured discourse into people's feeds.

oh, but they did. Measurably. Comment sentiments shifted drammatically following the post knockout period, especially on topics where comments typically get flooded by what is commonly called a troll account. Take videos covering pro-choice content or other content critical of US right wing talking points, which draw such bots like flies to shit. Post knockout? Near nada on new videos. It went from a sizable chunk of comments (~13%<amount<27%), to a fraction of a single %. That's a non trivial shift. Still looking at data, but something certainly did happen, and I think the memes are likely grounded in truth.