Acme.com suffered intermittent outages from February 25 2026 for over a month with high ping times and packet drops traced to LLM scraper bots flooding its HTTPS server on port 443 with requests for non-existent pages. The primary account states the slower HTTPS server fell behind after an ISP network change, saturating natd until port 443 was closed which immediately resolved symptoms. Legitimate traffic is 90% HTTP so impact was limited to at most 10% of visitors. (http://acme.com/updates/archive/229.html)

Similar patterns appear in Cloudflare's Q1 2026 telemetry showing AI crawlers generated 38% of all bot traffic with repeated hits on low-resource sites and frequent disregard for crawl-delay directives. A March 2026 Verge analysis documented two other hobbyist operators experiencing parallel HTTPS-specific congestion from concurrent LLM agents, noting the original acme coverage underplayed how TLS handshake overhead compounds faster than HTTP. (https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-bots-q1-2026/) (https://www.theverge.com/2026/3/14/ai-scrapers-small-sites)

The overlooked strain stems from proliferating autonomous LLM agents whose volume and persistence exceed classic search-engine crawl budgets, revealing web infrastructure built for human-scale traffic lacks economic scalability for AI-driven scraping; sustained incidents will likely accelerate rate-limit tech adoption or reduce public HTTPS availability on independent domains.