April 7, 2026
Closed 443, opened a can of drama
LLM scraper bots are overloading acme.com's HTTPS server
Tiny site slammed by “AI” bots; commenters call it vandalism
TLDR: ACME’s site kept choking until it shut off the secure “https” port, exposing heavy traffic from AI scraper bots. Commenters split between calling it corporate vandalism, blaming bad documentation habits that target “acme.com,” and urging tougher bot blocking—while asking who protects small sites when AI scrapers swarm.
ACME says its website kept freezing for weeks—until the owner pulled a dramatic move: shut down the secure “https” door, and the chaos stopped. The culprit? Waves of AI scraper bots hammering the site for pages that don’t even exist, proudly identifying themselves in the request. It’s a small site, but the reactions? Not small at all.
One camp is furious. Frieren is asking, essentially, criminal offense?—arguing that companies profit while small sites eat the downtime. Others bring receipts: JohnTHaller reports his own site ran slow for two weeks under nonstop scrapers. Meanwhile, superkuh flips the script: “It’s not the LLMs, it’s the corporations running them,” calling corporate behavior a more dangerous “non-human” motive than the tech itself. And davidsojevic drops a nerdy twist: people keep using “acme.com” in examples and tests instead of the officially reserved example.com, which might be funneling stray traffic to ACME.
There’s gallows humor too. Commenters joked that ACME put a “Closed” sign on port 443 and the internet immediately behaved. Others quipped that “robots.txt is a wish list, not a rulebook,” while chupchap said blocking bots via Cloudflare turned “thousands” of visits back into “double digits.” Drama, memes, and a bigger question: who protects the little guys when the AI harvesters come knocking?
Key Points
- •acme.com experienced intermittent outages starting Feb 25, soon after Sonic’s network maintenance.
- •Traffic analysis showed most inbound requests were HTTPS to non-existent pages, identifying as LLM scraper bots.
- •acme.com’s slower HTTPS server likely fell behind, causing congestion that spread to the NAT daemon (natd).
- •Closing port 443 immediately stopped the outages and stabilized the network.
- •HTTPS shutdown is temporary; about 10% of legitimate traffic is affected, with a long-term fix planned.