Hacker News brought down Atlas Obscura site

atlasobscura.com

1 pointoctopusRex3 comments

I just get a http error status and a blank page. Are they saying that HN sent too many people to their site? If so how many is too many for them? HN active user base is not that big so I would assume the issue is too many AI bots scraping and following links from HN which also means the AI bots are ignoring rel="nofollow" if that is the case.

They haven't said anything. But I realized that quite a few submissions in a short amount of time were posted. AI bot scraping sounds like a good explanation.

Funny, we take it for granted that sites will stay up - I'm old enough to remember pre commercial web when there was a courtesy rule about overloading. Especially with universities where we'd wait until after hours to connect.

So many posts today referring to articles on the site brought it down. I suppose we should keep this in mind when posting. I assume it wasn't intentional. :-)

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