OpenAI bot crushes small Ukrainian e-commerce website

Occurred: January 2025

Ukrainian e-commerce website Triplegangers suffered a major disruption to its operations due to relentless data scraping by an OpenAI bot.

What happened

OpenAI's bot sent tens of thousands of requests to Triplegangers' servers, effectively mimicking a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, causing its website to crash and disrupting operations for a small company that relies on its online presence to sell digital assets to video game developers and artists. 

The bot attempted to download extensive content from the site, including hundreds of thousands of images and detailed descriptions of over 65,000 products.

CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk reported that the bot operated from over 600 different IP addresses, leading to significant server strain and increased operational costs due to heightened bandwidth usage on Amazon AWS.

Why it happened

Triplegangers had failed to properly configure its robots.txt file, which is essential for instructing web crawlers about what content they are allowed to access. 

Although the company's terms of service prohibited unauthorised scraping, without a correctly set up robots.txt file, OpenAI's bot interpreted this as permission to scrape data freely.

Tomchuk expressed frustration over the lack of transparency from OpenAI and highlighted that small businesses are often left vulnerable to such aggressive data scraping practices without adequate support or tools from AI companies. 

What it means

The incident serves as a cautionary tale for small online businesses about the necessity of implementing robust protective measures against AI crawlers. 

It also demonstrates the need for greater transparency and accountability from technology companies about their crawling practices.

System 🤖


Operator: 
Developer: OpenAI
Country: Ukraine
Sector: Technology
Purpose: Scrape data
Technology: Bot/intelligent agent
Issue: Accountability; Security; Transparency

Page info
Type: Incident
Published: January 2025