Sorry for the outages: Bot spam is pushing our servers to the limit

A news site has struggled to stay online since May 17 after heavy bot crawling overwhelmed its servers.

Repeated database connection drops forced the hosting provider to block a user agent, which also limited access for some real users.

Operators say they are working on a permanent fix, but more disruptions are likely until the problem is resolved.

The incident highlights how aggressive scraping can disrupt publishing sites, hurt subscribers, and trigger broad defensive measures.