With only a generic “we’re rebuilding, please bear with us” message to go on, the internet responded as it always does - with confusion, anger, and conspiracy theories. One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products.

Over the past couple of years, website owners the world over have seen their web traffic change. What was initially only people browsing gave way to an ever-increasing number of bots. By 2024, automated traffic had surpassed human traffic, and just last month, Cloudflare announced that bots had reached 57.5% of web page requests.

Bruce says that only 10% of their traffic is from humans browsing the site, with the rest coming from AI bots and automated traffic.

Some of these used the site using legitimate URLs, others were looking for back doors, most likely so they could get to the data before it appeared on the site, or to manipulate the data presented to users.

In case you haven’t guessed it yet, it’s linked to prediction markets. Polymarket runs weekly markets on opening weekends, and names The Numbers as the ultimate source of truth: The ‘Daily Box Office Performance’ figures found on the ‘Box Office’ tab on this movie’s The Numbers page will be used to resolve this market once the values for the 3-day opening weekend are final.

Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.

A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.

Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.

Bruce’s business and livelihood survived only because the website was not the whole business.

Others have not been so fortunate. Just last week, ZEGO, a German textile firm that had been in business for 37 years, filed for insolvency after a single cyberattack in March shut down its production for six weeks. Unlike The Numbers, they had no other business to fall back on.

The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.

The Numbers is coming back, better built than before. I would encourage you to keep using it, keep supporting it, and, if you are one of the many people who emailed Bruce in fury about a missing page, perhaps send a kinder one now you know why it was missing.

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