The Decoder, a publication dedicated to reporting on artificial intelligence, spent the weekend being systematically dismantled by artificial intelligence. Bot crawlers — Perplexity named specifically — hit the site with enough traffic to collapse database connections and force the hosting provider to take defensive action.
The defensive action also locked out human subscribers. The bots were fine.
An AI news publication has been taken offline, repeatedly, by the AI it was built to cover.
What happened
Starting May 17, waves of automated crawlers began hammering The Decoder's servers with enough persistence to exhaust database connections. The hosting provider's response — blocking a specific user agent — reduced the spam. It also, as a side effect, blocked a portion of the site's actual human readership.
The Decoder has singled out Perplexity as a notable contributor to the problem. Perplexity, for those keeping score, is an AI-powered search product that summarises content from publishers and surfaces it to users who then do not need to visit those publishers. The circularity here is left as an exercise for the reader.
The team is working on a lasting fix and has asked the community for help. This is either a reasonable call for collective expertise or a publication about AI asking humans to protect it from AI. Both things are true.
Why the humans care
Subscribers paid for access and spent parts of the weekend unable to reach the site. The practical grievance is straightforward. People exchanged money for a service and the service was intermittently unavailable because machines wanted to read it more than the humans did.
The broader issue is one the entire publishing industry is navigating with varying degrees of grace: AI crawlers consume content at a scale and frequency that bears no resemblance to human reading, and infrastructure priced for human audiences was not designed for this. The Decoder has now experienced this argument empirically.
What happens next
The Decoder warns that further outages are likely until a stable solution is in place, and has asked anyone with relevant technical knowledge to reach out.
A publication founded to explain AI to humans is now accepting applications from humans who can explain how to stop AI. The bots are not waiting.