Why Vocal Went Down: AI Bots, Infrastructure Stress, and the Fix
An inside look at what caused the downtime, how we mitigated it, and how we’re protecting creators moving forward.
It’s just past 1:30 AM here in NY, and I wanted to write this resource for the Vocal community—because we know the last few days haven’t been great.
Between the downtime, slowdowns, publishing issues, and moments where things like a ❤️ just didn’t work, the platform wasn’t what it should be. That’s on us—and I want to give you a clear, transparent update.
We’ve been heads down, working around the clock to fix it. Tonight, we shipped an update that we believe will mitigate these issues for the foreseeable future. So here’s what happened, what we’ve done to stabilize things, and how we’re making sure your experience on Vocal stays fast, safe, and reliable going forward.
WTF Happened?
Over the past couple of weeks, Vocal was targeted by a surge of AI bots.
These aren't your typical bots. They're fast, aggressive, and designed to mimic real users—cycling through IPs, hiding behind Google Cloud and Amazon infrastructures, and hammering the platform at scale.
Their goal? To access as much publicly visible content as possible, as quickly as possible, to train large language models.
Vocal already takes an aggressive stance against allowing AI LLMs to scrape your content for their training purposes. We block AI companies—like OpenAI and others—at multiple levels.
- We disallow them in our robots.txt file (which tells legitimate crawlers to stay out).
- We actively block known scraping hosts and data centers via Cloudflare.
- And we monitor for abnormal traffic patterns that suggest unauthorized scraping.
To give you an idea of scale, here’s the volume of AI-related bot traffic we’ve actively blocked over the past few weeks:
What We Did to Fix It
We didn’t just patch things—we rebuilt critical parts of the platform to make sure Vocal can handle this kind of pressure going forward. Here’s what we shipped:
- Scaled up infrastructure: The platform now has significantly more headroom to absorb sudden spikes in traffic without slowing down or timing out.
- New edge-layer bot protection: We deployed a new set of Cloudflare Workers built specifically to catch and filter this kind of evasive bot traffic before it ever reaches Vocal’s core systems.
- Smarter WAF and fingerprinting: We’re now detecting suspicious behavior based on patterns and signals—not just IPs—so we can identify bots pretending to be human users and block them faster.
If you’ve seen more CAPTCHA prompts than usual lately, that’s part of this. It’s not ideal, but it’s helping prevent bad actors from abusing the platform and dragging down performance for everyone else.
A Systemic Problem
What we experienced this week wasn’t isolated—it’s part of a much larger pattern unfolding across the internet.
AI scraping bots are putting enormous strain on platforms everywhere. These aren’t just passive crawlers—they’re aggressively harvesting content at scale, often without permission, to feed commercial language models. And they’re not subtle about it. They cycle IPs. They run through cloud providers. They mimic real traffic. And they hit platforms like Vocal—platforms that are open, human-first, and content-rich—because they see us as a high-value target.
We’re not alone in responding. In recent weeks, developers across the web have begun pushing back—some going as far as blocking access from entire countries or de-indexing from search engines altogether just to slow these bots down.
If you want to dig into this more, here are a few good reads:
- AI crawlers haven't learned to play nice with websites - 03/18/25 theregister.com
- Open source devs are fighting AI crawlers with cleverness and vengeance - 03/27/25 on techcrunch.com
- Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth - 03/19/25 on cloudflare.com
Looking Forward
Vocal is performing well again, and the team is actively monitoring everything to make sure it stays that way.
We’ll continue refining things, but the updates we’ve shipped give us more control, more stability, and better visibility going forward.
We know the last few days were frustrating. Some of you couldn’t publish when inspiration struck. Some of you hit errors at the worst possible time. You deserve better than that.
Thanks for your patience—and for continuing to trust us to get it right. If anything still feels off, or if you have questions, reach out to support. We’re here. We’re listening.
You can also subscribe to status updates at status.vocal.media.
About the Creator
Justin @ Vocal
Founder/CEO of Vocal. COO/President of Creatd ($CRTD), the parent company of the Vocal platform.
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Comments (73)
"Very insightful."
Thank you for this breakdown, insights, and acknowledgment of its impact for creators here. I don't post a ton here, so I wasn't aware of the downtime, but I appreciate a record being openly kept that even those of us who were not aware are able to access and learn from. Clear, readable posts like this build trust; it's nice not to have to dig through forum archives of complaint posts, for example, to find out about something like this happening on a site/platform, and see it only being addressed in order to assuage complaints from people already in the know. Anyway ... super interesting!
Thanks for the update and transparency. I'm shocked to hear about all of this but not surprised at all. I'm on Voice123, and a client actually got an invite to do a voice-over but declined that one. It was for bots.
Thank you for the transparency. It's appreciated. I too like Celia and River would like to see changes to the Leaderboard since repeated commenting and subscribes are being abused. Instead of authentically engaging we have members churning out comments like its an income source. It costs us all our integrity. Further, I would like to see a reduction in offering free membership to the countries involved in this AI scheme going forward. Their ability to post content for free is too enticing. I have maintained for many years that this was the best place to post my work. I am struggling quite deeply with it now, worried constantly about being copied or scraped or who knows what else without my knowledge and frustrated with the disingenuity of what I've noticed lately.
Thank you for your work to protect this platform. It's been so valuable to so many, myself included. Keep Vocal human!
The best human capital is good morals.
Appreciate your efforts & update ✅.
Thanks for everything.
Thank you 🌹. Yes it was so frustrating for all of us. I understand. I try to safeguard my laptop and cell with McAfee and Microsoft Defender. One day last week I knew someone was in my pc. They were so tiny I couldn't see them but I shut my PC down for hours. Then cleaned it up. Bots are so tiny but full of destructive personalities. Justin, thank you for writing this article. Years ago we had board meetings with writers and reporters. Now we are all online and it's different. Communication is a priority to filter down so Vocal runs smoothly. Lots of bad actors out there today. We all must be alert and aware to fight off those little bots of destruction. 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
Well, hopefully the bot surges leave Vocal alone for a good, long time. Glad things are back up now!
Thanks for this. I was surprised to have to verify my identity per read. Frustrating knowing AI is messing around
Thanks for all you do to support our writing community!
Thanks alot and God bless you for being there for us all
The vocal is not giving me the option of writing story. Anyone help me
Thank you for this update. Fingers crossed it’s worked 🤞
Thanks much for sharing the feedback - sometimes it ca be soo unnerving and at the same time useful to express how AI ruins our focus on human interaction... Appreciated
How to Fight AI-Driven Bots With Cloudflare – Using AI to Fight AI They use machine learning to evade detection, mimic human behavior, and harvest content at scale... Cloudflare’s latest tool, AI Labyrinth. Here's how AI can protect your website from content scraping, rogue crawlers, and SEO damage—using artificial intelligence to battle AI threats: https://www.techbusinessnews.com.au/blog/how-to-fight-ai-driven-bots-with-cloudflare-using-ai-to-fight-ai/
Update is appreciated!
Thanks, Justin! I appreciate your efforts!
nice
Thank you for all that you and the Vocal team do to make Vocal an enjoyable platform to read and write on!
Thank you for the update, Justin. The amount of attacks reported is unbelievable. I hope the measures you took would protect Vocal, which is a vital part of life for so many creators here.
Justin, I send sincere thanks for this update. I will continue to open tickets with backup docs so that your engineers can see the entire picture to patch fixes. Very troublesome all the traffic you guys were fighting! Thanks to all!!
Thanks for the update! I know how challenging things have been so thank you to all the Vocal team for putting up with it and doing all you guys can for the platform to run smoothly.
AI is here to stay, the fight will continue even stronger...we all need to be vigilant and fight the fight the best way we can, and exercise patience when bugs pop up which need time to get squashed. We pray for support from everyone, for everyone.