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

Key points

• A Meta crawler visited the artist's website more than 550,000 times in 48 hours.
• The traffic consumed nearly all of the site's hosting resources, taking it down.
• The site owner cloned steps to block the bots using robots.txt and a firewall.
• A second Meta crawler, Meta Web Indexer, arrived and pushed usage to 100%.
• The artist seeks guardrails and tools to prevent future bot overreach.