Bots Overwhelmed Bear’s Reverse Proxy—What Broke and How It’s Now Hardened

Bear Blog suffered a major outage when its reverse proxy was overwhelmed by aggressive bot traffic, and monitoring failed to alert. While origin servers scaled, the proxy—upstream of most protections—became the choke point and crashed. The author added redundant monitoring, stricter proxy-level controls, more capacity, auto-recovery, and a status page, noting the ongoing arms race against bots.

Key Points

• Outage cause: the reverse proxy for custom domains was overwhelmed by a massive spike in bot traffic, and monitoring failed to alert.
• Bot landscape: identifiable AI scrapers (partly allowed), malicious vulnerability scanners, and unchecked hobbyist scrapers that can unintentionally DDoS sites.
• Observed behavior: millions of malicious requests and heavy IP rotation, likely via mobile-network tunnels, heightening the difficulty of blocking.
• Existing mitigations worked at the origin layer, but the proxy—upstream of many defenses—was the single point that saturated and toppled.
• Fixes: redundant multi-channel monitoring, tougher proxy-level rate limiting, 5x proxy capacity, auto-restart on zero bandwidth, and a public status page.

Sentiment

The overall sentiment of the Hacker News discussion is largely in agreement with the article's premise that aggressive bots are a major and escalating problem on the internet. There is strong corroboration of the author's experiences and explanations, particularly regarding residential proxies and bot evasion techniques. While some cynical viewpoints suggest giving up or raise concerns about centralization, there's a strong undercurrent of shared struggle, technical solution-seeking, and support for fighting to preserve the independent web.

In Agreement

• The widespread use of mobile and residential proxies (e.g., Bright Data, Luminati, Hola.org) for bot traffic is a commonly known and problematic fact, making bots difficult to block effectively due to rotating IPs and CGNAT.
• Many other web operators, particularly those with large content catalogs like book streaming platforms or WordPress sites, are experiencing similar issues with bots ignoring rate limits, spoofing user agents, and employing advanced evasion techniques (e.g., NobleTLS, JA3Cloak).
• AI scrapers are a significant and growing problem, creating a dilemma for site owners who want to be indexed by legitimate AI but not overwhelmed by poorly behaved ones.
• There is strong support for the author's commitment to fight against the degradation of the indie web, viewing it as an important battle for the internet's health.

Opposed

• Scraping public data is legal and essential for many internet services, suggesting that the focus should be on fair usage guidelines rather than political stances against scraping or DDoSing.
• Some argue that fighting against aggressive bots is a losing battle and an 'opportunity cost,' suggesting that indie blog hosts might consider exiting the business as the internet continues to decay.
• Concerns were raised about the increasing centralization of the internet due to services like Cloudflare, with some viewing it as part of the problem rather than a solution, and worrying about its potential power to ban or fingerprint users.
• Skepticism exists regarding the feasibility and trustworthiness of community-driven solutions for sharing and blocking malicious IP data, citing past examples of unreliable databases.