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Meta AI Crawlers Allegedly Overwhelmed an Artist’s Website With 550,000 Requests
Chelsea Paulus said a Meta crawler sent more than 550,000 requests to her website in 48 hours, and reporting describes her hosting resources reaching their limit.
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- Chelsea Paulus said a Meta crawler sent more than 550,000 requests to her website in 48 hours, and reporting describes her hosting resources reaching their limit.
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openai.comCreate a landscape editorial hero image for this Studio Global article: How did Meta’s AI crawlers allegedly disrupt the business website of San Diego children’s author and illustrator Chelsea Paulus, including S. Article summary: Paulus alleged that Meta’s automated crawlers exhausted her website’s hosting resources rather than bringing paying customers, leaving her business site effectively offline; Business Insider’s report confirms her allegat. Topic tags: general, general web, documentation. Style: premium digital editorial illustration, source-backed research mood, clean composition, high detail, modern web publication hero. Use reference image context only for broad subject, composition, and topical grounding; do not copy the exact image. Avoid: logos, brand marks, copyrighted characters, real person likenesses, fake screenshots, UI text, readable text, watermarks, charts with fak
A surge of automated requests can create real costs for a small business even when there is no evidence of malicious intent. San Diego children’s author and illustrator Chelsea Paulus said Meta crawlers overwhelmed her website; reporting describes more than 550,000 requests in 48 hours and hosting resources reaching their limit.53 The account raises a practical question for site owners: how much control do they have when a crawler’s activity strains the hosting plan that keeps a business online?
What happened to Paulus’s website
Paulus shared a SiteGround hosting plan across four websites. On October 24, SiteGround warned that the plan had used 80% of its CPU allowance.2 That figure referred to the shared plan’s resource use—not necessarily to Meta alone consuming 80% of a processor.
According to Fast Company’s report, Meta-ExternalAgent repeatedly called the site’s “remove from cart” function, generating more than 100 requests per minute and about 550,000 requests over the following days. After Paulus blocked that crawler, Meta-WebIndexer appeared two days later; Fast Company reported that the site’s CPU usage reached 100% and the site crashed.6 Business Insider separately reported Paulus’s account of more than 550,000 bot visits in 48 hours and hosting resources being consumed.
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These reports support the outline of a damaging traffic surge. They do not establish that Meta intentionally targeted Paulus or deliberately evaded a correctly configured block. Paulus herself said she did not believe the incident was a deliberate attack.2
The two crawlers have different stated purposes
Meta-ExternalAgent is described as crawling content for uses such as training foundation AI models or improving products by indexing content directly.12 Meta-WebIndexer, by contrast, is described as supporting Meta AI search results so that content can be cited and linked in answers.
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That distinction matters when a site owner decides which automated visitors to permit. Blocking one crawler does not necessarily address activity from another, because the crawlers serve different purposes and may be controlled separately.7
What Meta says site owners can control
Meta’s spokesperson said website managers could decide how the company’s crawlers interact with their sites.24 In coverage of Meta’s revised commercial terms, the company also said owners could use
robots.txt to manage crawler access.26 Those terms drew scrutiny because reporting described them as expanding crawling rights beyond advertisers.
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A robots.txt file signals which URLs a crawler may access; Google says the protocol is used mainly to avoid overloading a site.18 But Paulus’s account shows why a stated control and practical protection are not always the same thing: the available reports don’t establish exactly how her blocking attempts were configured, why a second crawler appeared, or whether it ignored a valid instruction.
A small-business problem at larger scale
Paulus’s case sits within a broader concern about automated traffic burdening small websites. Fast Company described site owners grappling with crawlers that can strain sites used to reach customers and sell products.6 For a business on shared hosting, a surge can affect a common resource pool—even when the traffic does not translate into sales.
DataDome reported that Meta-affiliated bots made up 46.3% of the AI crawler traffic it tracked in the first half of 2026.1
51 That is a share of DataDome’s observed traffic, not a measure of all web traffic. Cloudflare’s 2026 explainer also describes Meta-ExternalAgent as the second-most active bot by requests after Googlebot.
59 These figures provide context for the scale of crawler activity, but they do not show how often it disrupts individual small-business sites.
The clearest takeaway is limited but important: Paulus’s reported experience illustrates how crawler activity can consume hosting resources and threaten a small business’s online presence, while the available evidence does not prove deliberate targeting or explain exactly why her attempted blocks failed.
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Chelsea Paulus said a Meta crawler sent more than 550,000 requests to her website in 48 hours, and reporting describes her hosting resources reaching their limit.
Sources
businessinsider.comAn artist says Meta's bots overwhelmed her website and left her scrambling to protect her business
ithome.comMeta 爬虫疯狂涌入，一艺术家网站被挤爆
fastcompany.comMeta web crawlers crash small business websites as AI ...
webpossible.comAI Crawlers & robots.txt — Allow/Block Guide | WebPossible
51degrees.com