A San Diego-based children’s author and illustrator, Chelsea Paulus, told Business Insider that a Meta crawler bot visited her website more than 550,000 times in 48 hours, consuming nearly all of her site’s traffic allowance and overwhelming her hosting resources. Paulus, who has operated her business for a decade and became a full-time artist last year, said she received an email from her hosting provider, SiteGround, on October 24 warning that she had used 80% of her allocated CPU resources across four websites sharing a single hosting plan. She said requests were arriving several times a second, and an IP address traced to a Meta location in Dallas identified the visitor as “Meta External Agent,” later backed up by SiteGround operators. Paulus said she did not believe the activity was an intentional or malicious attack from Meta, but that small business owners need to be aware this could happen and be given tools to stop it. She edited her robots.txt file and put up a firewall, but said those can take 24 hours to take effect, so she contacted her host, which gave her code to add to a hidden file on her website.