Did r/Conservative go quiet after Ukraine hit Yandex's data centers?

A Reddit thread claimed "Russian disinformation bot traffic" was "nearly eliminated overnight" after Ukrainian drone strikes disabled Yandex data centers on Oct 8–9, 2026 (a third, in Vladimir, followed on Oct 11), and commenters said r/Conservative activity visibly dropped. This page checks that claim against archived Reddit data, with control subreddits and a placebo test. It is deliberately plain: numbers, charts, and the method.

Read this before the charts. This is correlation at best, and the premise being tested is weak. Even a clean, subreddit-specific drop on Oct 8 would not establish a Yandex link: influence operations run on residential proxies, rented accounts, and commodity cloud spread across many providers and countries, precisely so that no single facility is a point of failure — a modern network is built to survive far more than one company losing three data centers. News cycles also move activity around on their own. Conversely, no drop here does not show such networks are absent; it only says this subreddit's visible comment activity did not change when the data centers went down. Treat the page as a check on one specific, testable claim, not as evidence about disinformation in general.

1. Daily comments on r/Conservative

Comments per day, r/Conservative (UTC days)

Shaded band = ±1 std. dev. around the September same-weekday mean. Red markers = strike dates. Last day is partial.

Longer view: comments per day over the past year (7-day centered average)

Context for the September baseline. The subreddit's comment volume declined through 2026 — from several thousand a day in January–February to roughly two thousand a day by late summer — well before the October strikes. Daily counts for every subreddit on this page go back to Oct 1, 2025.

r/Conservative comments as a share of all Reddit comments

Dividing by Reddit-wide volume removes platform-wide swings (outages, weekends, holidays). A subreddit-specific loss of traffic shows up here even if Reddit as a whole was busy.

Posts per day and distinct posting accounts, r/Conservative

Posts are where votes happen; a drop in submitters would matter for the vote-score claim even if commenting held steady.

A year of r/Conservative, day by day: comments per day as a calendar heatmap

Darker = more comments. Red outline = strike days. Rows are weekdays (Mon at top), columns are weeks.

2. Is it specific to r/Conservative? Indexed vs. control subreddits

Daily comments as % of each community's own September same-weekday mean

100% = normal for that weekday. If a subreddit lost a bot network, its line should fall after Oct 8 while the controls don't. The latest full day for control subreddits may still be filling in as the archive catches up.

2b. Other subreddits named in the thread

Commenters also pointed at r/SipsTea, r/Fauxmoi, r/WhoaThatsInteresting, r/pourtea and r/whatisthetea ("something happened 10–12 hours ago that broke whatever normally runs that sub"). The first three are in the archive; r/pourtea and r/whatisthetea return no data (not indexed, private, or too small), so they cannot be checked here.

Daily comments as % of each community's own September same-weekday mean — subreddits named in the thread

Same method as the chart above. r/WhoaThatsInteresting is driven by single viral threads: two posts with 6,000+ comments each on Oct 7 and Oct 8 produced the spike, and Oct 9–10 fell back to its ordinary late-September range (2,400–7,000 comments/day). r/Fauxmoi's Oct 9–10 (6,900 and 5,600) is within its Oct 3–5 range. The latest full day may still be filling in as the archive catches up.

2c. Six subreddits from a later ranking

A later r/dataisbeautiful post ranked subreddits by activity change in 12-hour windows after each of the three strikes, using the silkier-muses/raes dataset (hourly posts plus comments from a third-party counter). It was reposted to r/Millennials under the title "this sub is #5 for Russian bot activity". The dataset's own README says none of its provisional decreases survives every tested start hour and window length. That list is used here only to choose which communities to look at: five of the top six in its activity-weighted top 30 (r/ufc is not in the archive used here) plus r/news. The figures below are this page's own numbers, from the same archive and the same method as the charts above — daily comments against each community's September same-weekday mean — so they are not comparable with the ranking's 12-hour percentages. r/formula1 and r/nascar follow weekend race schedules, and r/2007scape had a disputed game update from Oct 7; the ranking's author and commenters noted the same event effects.

Daily comments as % of each community's own September same-weekday mean — six sampled subreddits

Same method as the charts above. 100% = normal for that weekday. The latest full day may still be filling in as the archive catches up.

One year of daily comments, 7-day average, indexed to each community's own yearly median (= 100%)

Context for the chart above: where the strike week sits against a full year of each community's ordinary swings. Daily counts for every subreddit on this page go back to Oct 1, 2025.

3. Who is commenting: unique accounts and removed comments

Unique visible commenter accounts per day, r/Conservative

Counts distinct account names on comments that survived moderation. Bots that vanished would show here as a step down.

Longer view: unique visible commenter accounts per day (7-day average)

Backfilled as far as the archive's per-day author aggregates have been pulled.

Comments removed by moderation within seconds of posting, r/Conservative

Share of all comments whose author shows as [deleted] and body as [removed] in the archive snapshot (taken ~15–60 s after posting). This is the subreddit's flaired-users-only AutoModerator rule at work — see methodology.

4. Hourly view around the strikes

Comments per hour, r/Conservative, Oct 5 onward (UTC)

Shaded = approximate strike windows (Sasovo: overnight Oct 7→8 Moscow time; Kaluga: Oct 9 daytime; Vladimir: overnight Oct 10→11, exact hour not reported). A network going dark should produce a step, not a wiggle.

Hour-by-hour profile: strike days vs. a typical same weekday (UTC)

Dashed = average for that weekday over Sep 21–Oct 7. A network switching off would show as hours sitting well below the dashed curve from the strike onward.

5. Did regular accounts disappear?

For each cutoff date, take every account that commented at least N times in the 14 days before, then check whether it commented at all in the ${D.after_days||3} days after. The same calculation run on five earlier Thursdays (placebo cutoffs) shows the normal churn, so the Oct 8 row can be judged against it.

Share of regular accounts (≥10 comments in prior 14 days) silent for the days after each cutoff

Placebo Thursdays vs. the strike week (same window length). If a network of regulars had gone dark, the Oct 8 bar would stand well above the others.

Newer accounts among visible commenters

The archive's user index records each account's first-ever activity, but it was last fully updated in August 2025. Accounts missing from it are therefore ones first active after that — roughly, accounts younger than ~14 months — or never indexed. If a network of fresh accounts had been switched off (or on), this share would move.

Share of distinct visible commenter accounts per day that are newer than the archive's user index (≈ under 14 months old)

Older accounts (first active before Aug 2025) make up the remainder.

6. Daily table

7. Interpretation

One line, on the facts above: Nothing in a year of archived data suggests the Oct 8–11 Yandex strikes changed r/Conservative — in the days since, comments and distinct commenters have run at or above their September norms (Sunday Oct 11 was the busiest Sunday in six weeks), fewer regular accounts went quiet than in any placebo week, and the newer-account share, removed-comment counts and control subreddits all held steady — so what people noticed is most plausibly the subreddit's months-long decline plus an archive that hadn't yet re-crawled vote scores, not a bot network going dark.

8. Export

Everything on this page is downloadable: data.json (all derived series) · daily table (CSV) · vanished-regulars table (CSV) · hourly comments (CSV) · six sampled subreddits, one year (CSV). Each chart has PNG and JPEG buttons in its corner. Every section header is a permalink (hover for the #).

9. Methodology

Data source

All counts come from Arctic Shift, an open, continuously updated archive of public Reddit posts and comments (the successor to Pushshift). It was queried through its public HTTP API — no Reddit API keys, no scraping of reddit.com. Three endpoints were used:

/api/time_series for daily post and comment counts per subreddit and Reddit-wide.
/api/comments/search/aggregate?aggregate=author per UTC day to count distinct commenting accounts and compute the vanished-regulars test.
/api/comments/search and /api/posts/search to pull individual r/Conservative comments (Sep 20–Oct 11) for the hourly view and to inspect removed comments.

Baseline and comparison

Baseline = Sep 1–Oct 5, 2026, by weekday. Each post-strike day is compared with the mean of the same weekday in the baseline, because Reddit activity has a strong weekly cycle (Saturdays run ~40% below Tuesdays on r/Conservative).
Controls: r/politics, r/neoliberal, r/moderatepolitics, r/Libertarian, r/conspiracy, r/collapse, r/worldnews, r/technology, r/AskReddit, and all of Reddit. If every community dips on the same day, the cause is Reddit-wide (an outage, a holiday, a news lull), not something specific to one subreddit.
Strike timing: Yandex's Sasovo (Ryazan) data center was hit overnight Oct 7→8 local time (roughly 21:00 UTC Oct 7 to 03:00 UTC Oct 8); the Kaluga facility on Oct 9; a third, the Vladimir data center, was reported shut down after a drone attack on Sunday Oct 11 (reports give no strike time; the shaded window is approximate). Sources: Reuters, Kyiv Post, Newsweek, The Record, The Moscow Times (Oct 11), Kyiv Independent (Oct 11).

What the archive can and cannot tell you

Vote scores are not usable for recent days. The archive captures each post and comment within about a minute of creation, when its score is 1, and only re-crawls scores later. As of this page's build, Oct 9–11 posts still showed their initial snapshot. Because of this, score-based measures are not shown here; vote counts for recent posts can only be checked against reddit.com itself.
Removed comments. 55–85% of r/Conservative comments are removed within seconds of posting (author shows as [deleted], body as [removed] in snapshots taken 15–60 s later). That is the subreddit's long-standing "flaired users only" AutoModerator rule, which removes comments from accounts without a community flair. Consequence: visible comment activity on r/Conservative is almost entirely flaired regulars. A bot network would have great difficulty commenting visibly there; it could still vote. The removed-comment count is therefore also shown — if unflaired bot accounts stopped posting, the number of removals would fall.
Unique commenters are distinct account names on surviving comments only (removed comments carry no author in the archive).
Timestamps are UTC. The last day shown is partial (through the build time).
This is correlation at best. Even a clean, subreddit-specific drop on Oct 8 would not prove a Yandex link: influence operations generally run on residential proxies and commodity cloud, not visibly on one Russian provider, and news cycles move activity around by themselves. Conversely, no drop here does not prove such networks don't exist — it only says this subreddit's comment activity did not change when the data centers went down.
Account age is approximated from the archive's user index (first-ever post or comment), which was last fully refreshed in August 2025; accounts absent from it are treated as "newer". Exact creation dates would need reddit.com.
Not addressed: post vote scores (needs live reddit.com data) and any subreddit other than those listed.

Reproducing

Every query is a plain HTTPS GET against the endpoints above; the derived numbers on this page are in data.json. The pipeline is ~150 lines of Python using only the standard library.