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How Meta’s AI Crawlers Overwhelmed One Artist’s Website
Reports say a Meta crawler made more than 550,000 requests to illustrator Chelsea Paulus’s website in 48 hours, looping on a “remove from cart” function and overwhelming her hosting resources.
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Key takeaways
- Reports say a Meta crawler made more than 550,000 requests to illustrator Chelsea Paulus’s website in 48 hours, looping on a “remove from cart” function and overwhelming her hosting resources.
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openai.comCreate a landscape editorial hero image for this Studio Global article: How did Meta’s AI crawlers reportedly overwhelm the business website of San Diego children’s author and illustrator Chelsea Paulus with roug. Article summary: The reporting supports the core account: a Meta crawler reportedly made more than 550,000 visits to Chelsea Paulus’s website in 48 hours, overwhelming its hosting resources; another report identified Meta-ExternalAgent l. Topic tags: general, general web, user generated. 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 fa
A Meta crawler reportedly made more than 550,000 visits to children’s author and illustrator Chelsea Paulus’s website in 48 hours, overwhelming the resources available to her small-business site. Fast Company reported that the bot became stuck on the shop’s “remove from cart” function; Business Insider also reported that the automated traffic strained her hosting. 3
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The episode illustrates a practical problem for website owners: having a way to tell crawlers not to visit is not the same as preventing a damaging surge of requests. But the available reports do not verify every detail of Paulus’s technical setup or the steps she tried afterward.
What happened to Paulus’s website
Fast Company reported that Meta-ExternalAgent repeatedly hit the “remove from cart” function, generating more than 100 hits per minute and about 550,000 hits over the following days. The article said the site’s CPU usage reached 80% and her host warned that it could go down at 100%. 3
Business Insider separately reported that a Meta crawler visited Paulus’s site more than 550,000 times in 48 hours and overwhelmed its hosting resources. 8 These accounts establish the reported scale and impact, but do not provide enough detail to independently reconstruct the full request logs or hosting configuration.
Fast Company also reported that Paulus blocked the first bot and that Meta-WebIndexer appeared two days later. 3 The available excerpts do not confirm exactly how she blocked it, what happened when she tried robots.txt, a firewall or host-provided code, or whether the later crawler alone caused the site to fail.
The two crawler names refer to different functions
The reported bots were not simply two names for one tool. A crawler guide distinguishes Meta-ExternalAgent, associated with AI training and product indexing, from Meta-WebIndexer, which builds an index used for Meta AI search answers. 4 That distinction matters when site owners consider access: blocking one crawler does not necessarily address requests from another.
Meta’s response, as reported by Business Insider, was that website managers can decide how its crawlers interact with their sites. 8 That describes a control available to site owners; it does not, by itself, explain how a high volume of requests is prevented or what protection a small hosting plan provides.
What the account does—and does not—show
The reporting supports the central account: a crawler loop was associated with a sharp rise in requests, and Paulus’s host warned that site resources were under strain. 3
8 It does not establish that Meta intended to disrupt the site. Nor do the available excerpts verify the detailed account of a Dallas IP address, four websites sharing one hosting plan, the site’s condition on November 2, or plans involving an Instagram link and Cloudflare’s human-verification tools.
The same caution applies to broader figures. The sources provided here do not substantiate the specific claims that Meta represented 46.3% of tracked AI traffic, that its traffic grew 164.9% from January to June 2026, or that Meta-ExternalAgent ranked second only to Googlebot. Those figures should not be treated as established by this case.
Why crawler controls became a business issue
Meta faced publisher criticism over proposed business terms connected to AI scraping. The Verge reported that Meta delayed enforcement of the terms until November 20, 2026, after publishers raised concerns about their implications. 1 That debate is related to, but separate from, the technical issue in Paulus’s case: terms governing access do not show whether an individual website can withstand a burst of requests.
For small site owners, the practical concern is resource capacity. Blocking a crawler may limit access, while allowing it may preserve some forms of discovery or indexing; the right choice depends on a site’s goals and infrastructure. The reports on Paulus’s experience make the limits of that choice visible: control over crawler access is useful, but it is not the same as an assurance that a site will not be overwhelmed.
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Reports say a Meta crawler made more than 550,000 requests to illustrator Chelsea Paulus’s website in 48 hours, looping on a “remove from cart” function and overwhelming her hosting resources.
Sources
fastcompany.comMeta's web crawlers are making life hell for owners of small business websites
businessinsider.comAn artist says Meta's bots overwhelmed her website and left her scrambling to protect her business
dev.toMeta Crawls Your Site From Oct 30 — A Dev's Checklist
theverge.comMeta delays new business terms after publisher pushback ...