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

We're deeply sorry to say that our site has been hard to reach since May 17, causing inconvenience to our subscribers and users. The root of the problem lies in a massive wave of bots crawling our pages, overwhelming our servers and pushing them to their limits. This bot spam has proven to be a formidable challenge, and we're working tirelessly to find a lasting solution.

Over the weekend, the situation escalated when our database connection dropped several times. In response, our hosting provider took the step of blocking a specific user agent, which helped mitigate the spam but also inadvertently locked some users out of the site. We're aware of the disruption this has caused and are committed to resolving the issue as quickly as possible.

We're actively seeking help from the community, particularly from those with the necessary expertise, to aid in the development of a robust fix. One notable culprit in this bot spam campaign is Perplexity, which we've identified as a significant contributor to the problem. Unfortunately, this means that we may experience further outages until a stable solution is implemented.

In the meantime, we want to assure our subscribers that we're doing everything in our power to restore uninterrupted access to our site. We appreciate your patience and understanding during this challenging time. As a token of our appreciation for your loyalty, we invite you to subscribe to THE DECODER for an ad-free reading experience, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report published six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.