A quick update on the latest site service interruptions. These have been due to a sharp increase in site access requests from what is probably data scraping activity targeting the Old Weather site. We've had similar problems from time to time over the last couple of years and have had some success by blocking/banning bots at the server level. Unfortunately, the 'bots' have gotten more sophisticated and now manifest as more or less generic direct access requests, the same as what the site gets from legitimate users. They don't run 24/7 (yet) so the peak activity which overwhelms the site doesn't happen all the time (yet). The latest activity is occurring roughly on the hour, between about 16:00 and 20:00 GMT, with each resulting hourly outage lasting 30-50 minutes. We've been trying to combat this by blocking entire IP ranges based on the logged sources of the highest traffic, we'll see how that goes over the next day or so. Several of the high-traffic sources overlap with the domains of legitimate users, so that complicates things. BTW, I use the free version of a site up-time monitoring service and get emails when the site goes down/up, there are several of these around which you can use if you're interested in those details.
I think the bottom line here is that we have hobbyist-grade internet services getting crunched by the AI data hogs. Wish the news was better, but we do still have 90%+ overall up time.
Site status:
https://stats.uptimerobot.com/4YzMwuJlzA
