Misadventures

AI crawler server crashRedis ErrorWordPress

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...