The Unexpected News Story#
Xcelerate is Fastly's annual conference series - a smaller event, but always interesting given their deep technical approach to content delivery. These are typically technical discussions among practitioners, not press events. So when a journalist asked a question at the end of my talk, I answered honestly about the scale of what we'd managed during the Olympics.
The next day, IT News ran with it: "Nine's web app protection blocked 96m bad requests in 2024 Olympics."
The Context That Makes It Less Dramatic#
Here's the thing - while that number sounds massive, it's actually just business as usual at scale. When you're processing 1.2 billion daily web requests across brands like the AFR, Nine News, and the Sydney Morning Herald, blocking millions of bad requests is an everyday occurrence. With scale comes attention, and those services are being tested constantly.
There was a small increase during the Olympics, but nothing out of the ordinary or beyond the expected bump from such a massive global event. The 96 million figure was intended as a hook for the technical discussion about how we handle that scale, not as an "OMG" moment.
Though I did later learn it triggered some interesting questions to senior leadership. Oops!
The AI Scraping Conversation#
The more interesting part of the discussion (to me, anyway) was about AI scrapers and how they're increasingly lifting content from our subscription brands like the AFR, The Age, and the Sydney Morning Herald. I've written more about this challenge in my Code & Consequence newsletter.
The anecdote that stuck with me was testing Perplexity with an AFR article about pharmaceuticals. It confidently summarized the article... by making up three random ASX-listed pharma companies and inventing the entire response. Turns out AI scrapers aren't quite as smart as we feared - but they're very confident about it.
The Takeaway#
Conference talks are interesting - you design them for a technical audience, craft a hook to make the numbers relatable, and sometimes a journalist picks up on the hook and runs with it. The resulting article is accurate, but the headline makes it sound more dramatic than the day-to-day reality of running large-scale internet properties.
Still, it's a reminder that when you operate at scale, even routine numbers can sound newsworthy.