LLM crawlers DDoS SourceHut's git hosting into 168 hours of tracked downtime

SourceHut's public status page tracked a git.sr.ht disruption caused by what the maintainers described as aggressive LLM crawlers continuing to DDoS the service, resolved after 168 hours 30 minutes of tracked downtime. The team's fix was deploying Anubis, a proof-of-work challenge proxy that makes uncontrolled automated clients pay compute per request. The Register reported the git-hosting service had faced repeated disruptions from crawlers making excessive data demands.

What this means for youWebsites and online services that host public code or content can slow down or go offline when AI data-collection bots pull too much at once. At work, teams that rely on such services may face unexpected downtime and should check their hosting provider's status and access rules.