LLM scraper bots are overloading acme.com's HTTPS server, owner says

Outage and discovery

It has been reported that acme.com suffered intermittent network outages starting February 25 and lasting a little over a month, with very high ping times and packet loss that would flare for hours then calm. The site owner initially blamed a recent ISP (Sonic) maintenance and spent time hunting local config issues; they fixed a few mistakes, but the outages kept coming. One sleepless, anxiety-fueled 1 a.m. diagnosis changed everything: closing port 443 — the HTTPS service — made the problem vanish immediately.

What the owner found

The owner observed two web servers on the same machine: HTTP was fast, HTTPS was lagging. The theory goes like this: some change during the ISP maintenance nudged the HTTPS server from “barely coping” into “falling behind,” and simultaneous heavy scraping from bots pushed it over the edge. When the HTTPS process stalled, congestion allegedly cascaded into natd (the NAT daemon), saturating the host and causing packet delays and drops across the board. Closing HTTPS stopped the cascade. Strange, right? Sleep-deprived sleuthing for the win.

A symptom of a bigger problem

This isn’t just one hobbyist’s headache. It has been reported that the owner knows of at least two other small sites hit similarly, and claims that LLM companies aren’t picking on them in particular but are broadly hammering web servers with scraper traffic. Who’s policing this tidal wave of automated requests? No single villain to point at yet — but the scene fits a larger trend of massive scraper loads driven by models and data harvesters.

What’s next

For now the owner accepts losing roughly 10% of traffic (most visitors use plain HTTP) while planning a proper fix. The episode is a wake-up call for small operators: bot management, rate-limiting, TLS offload or CDNs can matter more than ever. Someone should do something — and soon — before more hobby sites burn midnight oil chasing phantom outages.

Sources: acme.com, Hacker News