question about server shutdowns

[Trouble Ahead]

I have a problem on both of my worlds, I get suddenly disconnected , servers shut down. I got this message posted on discord written by Ilan:

"The huge increase in AI bot activity on the web causes millions of servers to become overloaded with requests. On Kitely this can cause our monitoring service to lose its verified connection to affected servers, which prompts our system to automatically shut them down to avoid data loss. Our system sends viewers that are currently logged into worlds on such servers a notification 2 minutes before it shuts down the servers.

If you get a notification that the world that you're currently in is on a server that is shutting down then teleport to the Kitely Welcome Center, wait 3 minutes for the shut down process to complete, then teleport back to the world you were in. This will enable you to avoid being disconnected when the world is shut down."

My question is: why is Kitely having this problem while other services seem to be free from shut downs ( like SL ) and the services I run my private websites on, and how can be avoided in the future we are dealing with this ? It is very disturbing when you are into an event or when being in a building process.

Thanks in advance .

[Snoots Dwagon]

I surely understand and agrees with how upsetting this can be.

However, I have noticed this on Second Life... and didn't realize what it was or what was causing it.

Several times lately I have logged into our region on SL only to be given a message (I forget exactly, but similar to):

We are sorry. Your region seems to not be responding properly, which will limit access and performance. Please move to another region or relog, reset your region if possible, then return in ten minutes.

(That's not the exact message, but you get the drift.)

I've not seen this message before, and I've been on SL 22 years now. So something is surely going on. I just had no idea what it was. But that message has been coming up a LOT lately.

[Trouble Ahead]

Ah , it seems dwagon related

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Trouble,

This AI bot issue is causing a LOT of problems for millions of websites. It affects anyone that has a net presence that AI bots deem worthy of scraping. You can find MANY articles about this problem. Here are just a few:

https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructu ... companies/
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/h ... -projects/
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/10/how-o ... os-attack/

Kitely has a lot of content that AI bots want to scrape. We are hit by dozens of AI bots from all over the world every day, each operating in ways that are very similar to DDoS (distributed denial of service attacks). We've tried multiple strategies to mitigate this and bots quickly bypass every new strategy we've tried. Earlier this month we rolled out a system that automatically takes down our forums when AI bots "attack" it and only restores it once they stop. We hope that this will reduce our attractiveness for these bots but they aren't interested in just our forums, they want everything they can access and that causes timeouts between our main servers and the servers that host our worlds. This in turn leads to these worlds been automatically restarted on new servers, which helps our system restore its connection to them but does cause unwanted server resets.

My best recommendation is if your world shuts down unexpectedly then restart your viewer and reenter it. You don't need to wait, worst case you'll be routed via a Transfer Station until the world has completed its reactivation. I recommend you instruct your visitors to act similarly.

I know it's a huge hassle but if it's any consolation, it's a problem that now exists for almost all web-based services and at least our system has had a lot less downtime than other web services that have been targeted by these bots.

[Fayre Scribe]

One more reason to dislike and distrust AI.

[Tess Juel]

Right now Cloudflare is down. Cloudflare provides crucial services to a fifth or more of the entire internet (including Second Life, ChatGPT X-Twitter) so this is going to be interesting.
According to Cloudflare the problems are caused by "unusual spike in traffic" and I thnk we all can make a good guess what that means. If the AI bots can take down a giant like this, no wonder poor Kitely is struggling.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Tess,

The AI bot problem is hitting everyone, even the internet giants that host millions of sites and have billions in investable funds to try to combat it. This is a huge problem that has to be handled by governments. I know it's annoying as hell when this causes frequent world server restarts in Kitely, but at least our system automatically recovers and we've managed to prevent entire system shutdowns.

[Ilan Tochner]

Well, I spoke too early

We just finished handling a massive AI bot "attack" that took down our entire site for almost an hour because every time our system restarted itself it would immediately get swamped by tens of thousands of concurrent requests from thousands of different servers. It took us almost an hour to block them all.

You should now be able to resume using Kitely normally.