An artist says Meta’s bots overwhelmed her website and left her scrambling to protect her business

A San Diego artist, Chelsea Paulus, experienced an overwhelming influx of hits from Meta's crawler bots on her website, causing her to struggle to keep her business online. The Meta bots visited her website over 550,000 times in just 48 hours, consuming nearly all of her site's traffic allowance and forcing her to take drastic measures to protect her online presence.

Paulus, a children's author and illustrator, had been operating her business for a decade and became a full-time artist the previous year. She initially welcomed the attention, as she wanted more people to visit her website. However, the sheer volume of traffic from the Meta bots left her scrambling to keep her business operational and her hosting resources intact.

When Paulus noticed that she had used 80% of her allocated CPU resources, her hosting provider, SiteGround, alerted her. Upon checking her website's security dashboard, she saw continuous requests arriving several times a second, which she later identified as coming from a Meta External Agent, a crawler used for training AI models or indexing content.

Despite having experience in web design and tech, Paulus said this was the first time she had encountered such a massive number of hits from a Meta bot. She quickly took action by editing her robots.txt file and adding firewall protection, but these measures took 24 hours to take effect. To stop the bots immediately, she contacted her host, who provided her with code to add to a hidden file on her website, a solution that was temporary and only a temporary fix.

By mid-week, another Meta bot, the Meta Web Indexer, arrived, pushing her hosting resource usage to 100%. A Meta spokesperson told Business Insider that the bots are not intentionally malicious but emphasized the need for small business owners to be aware of the potential issue and be given tools to stop it.