A prominent news website experienced a sudden surge in traffic, resulting in an overwhelming number of requests to its APIs. This excessive activity triggered a rate limit, causing Cloudflare’s protection service to block the API calls. The blocking occurred because the website had exceeded its allowed API request threshold for a short period.
The incident was reported by developers working on the news site, who expressed surprise and concern about the sudden spike in traffic. They noted that this issue should have been mitigated using tools such as rate limiting or caching to prevent such occurrences.
Cloudflare’s service blocks or limits excessive traffic to protect its users from abuse. While this measure may be inconvenient for legitimate users, it helps safeguard against malicious activity and ensures the stability of online services.
Source: https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/why-commanders-jayden-daniels-could-be-having-best-rookie-season-in-nfl-history