Hidden in Plain Sight: The WordPress Hack Only Google Could See
I only went in to add one file It started as one of those small, satisfying jobs. I was working with Claude, the AI assistant I use for much of my website work, to put together an llms.txt file for a client’s website. It’s a simple text file that helps AI tools understand what a site is about, and I’d been meaning to roll them out across my clients’ sites for a while. To write it, Claude read through the live site to gather the details. Partway through, it stopped and flagged something I hadn’t asked about: right at the...
Down for Ten Minutes: How a Pile-Up of AI Bots Took Out Two Client Sites (And What I Changed Afterwards)
I had an early night planned. Instead, I got an SOS email from a client: their site was down, showing a cryptic error about something called “Redis.” A few minutes later, I realised a second client site — hosted on the same server — was down too. Here’s the investigation that followed, what actually caused it, and what I changed as a result. If you run a website — or a few — I think there’s something useful in here for you too, because this isn’t really a story about my server. It’s a story about where web traffic is...