Bear Blog went dark after getting swarmed by scrapers. The reverse proxy choked first - too many requests, not enough heads-up. Downstream defenses didn’t catch it in time. So: fire, meet upgrades.
What changed: Proxies scaled 5×. Upstream got strict with rate limits. Failover now has a pulse. Restarts kick in when traffic smells weird.
Bots are hammering higher in the stack. That means proxies, not app servers, are the new front line. Rate limits and resilience need to start there now.
