January 16, 2026
When bots bite, takes get spicy
LWN is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet
Fans cry “AI parasites” as LWN buckles under bot swarm
TLDR: LWN says it’s under its biggest bot-driven traffic flood, blaming aggressive content scrapers tied to AI tools. Commenters split between doom (“the web is broken”), hard fixes (challenge pages, traps), and skepticism about what’s really happening — all agreeing creators are getting squeezed and readers may lose access.
Beloved Linux news site LWN just got slammed by what co-founder Jonathan Corbet calls the biggest scraper-driven traffic flood yet — a bot swarm so intense it feels like a digital pile‑on. He’s furious at “AI” data harvesters and even floated data broker Bright Data as a likely culprit, but said he hates the idea of putting hurdles between LWN and its readers. Cue the comments section going full wildfire.
The hottest take? “The web is doomed.” One longtime reader raged that search engines boost stolen copies while starving originals — a double hit that wrecks revenue and now, allegedly, wrecks uptime too. Another user went darker: if one company DDoSes (floods a site with garbage traffic) the source, rivals can’t scrape it — “what a world they’ve built.” Others brought gallows humor, dubbing AI “Arsehole Incorporated,” while the old‑school crowd rallied with #hugops and offers of help. Meanwhile, skeptics asked the spicy question: is this truly a DDoS or just aggressive scrapers? One commenter said the site seemed fine; another proposed booby‑trapping pages with sneaky JavaScript and hiding stuff in the page’s “shadow” — clever, but it might break testing tools and hurt search.
Between calls for challenge pages, volunteer help, and doomposting, one thing’s clear: readers are ready to fight for LWN — and fight each other about how
Key Points
- •LWN is experiencing its heaviest scraper-driven DDoS attack to date.
- •The attack involves tens of thousands of source addresses and reduces site responsiveness.
- •Jonathan Corbet is considering adding barriers that could affect reader access to mitigate the attack.
- •Corbet states there is no definitive way to identify who is after the data.
- •He suggests, without confirmation, that Bright Data or a similar competitor may be involved.