Today, one of our customers reported that the website was slow and unresponsive, displaying a 503 “Service Unavailable” error. After reviewing the server logs, we quickly identified that the most active IPs crawling the website originated from Apple’s network.
ex. 17.246.23.223, 17.22.253.193, and 2a03:2880:f806:3::
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17.241.219.210 - 1071 hits 17.241.227.209 - 1070 hits 17.22.237.227 - 1068 hits 17.22.237.178 - 1063 hits 17.22.253.89 - 1063 hits
17.241.219.210 - - [01/Mar/2026:07:18:56 +0000] "GET /shop/" 403 1242 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)"
We also learned from the Reddit community that, recently, AppleBot has been observed crawling three times more than Google Bots, one user noticed over 5k pages being crawled daily.
To review the list of IPs sending concurrent hits to the website, we used the following script. Since the website was WordPress-based, the script was added inside the mu-plugins folder.
However, the code can be adapted for any other platform.
For Apache, the following .htaccess code is very effective and can be easily adapted depending on the web server running behind the website.
#Agressive bots .htaccess code BrowserMatchNoCase "SeznamBot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Applebot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "CCBot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "ZoominfoBot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Sogou" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Applebot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Amazonbot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Meta-ExternalAgent" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "AhrefsBot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "AspiegelBot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Baiduspider" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "BLEXBot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Daum" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Dotbot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Exabot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Gigabot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "GrapeshotCrawler" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "MegaIndex" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "MJ12bot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "PetalBot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "proximic" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Qwantify" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Scrapy" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "SemrushBot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Sitebot" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Yandex" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "Bytespider" bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase "ClaudeBot" bad_bot #Deny selected bots Order Allow,Deny Allow from all Deny from env=bad_bot #Applebot Deny from 17.0.0.0/9 #Meta Platforms Ireland Limited Deny from 2a03:2880:f806::/48
Conclusion: If your website suddenly becomes unresponsive and shows a 503 error, you can restrict public access, allowing only your IP address. If the website is back, the issue is most likely from excessive crawls. Instead of immediately upgrading your hosting plan, you may consider limiting abusive bots.
