The Numbers.com, a leading source for film industry data, experienced a catastrophic outage on March 5, 2026, vanishing for over a week before resurfacing in a significantly reduced state. The site, founded by Bruce Nash, has been the definitive authority on box office grosses, budgets, and more for decades, serving journalists, academics, and filmmakers.

The outage was attributed to an overwhelming surge of AI bots and automated traffic, which began escalating around 2024 and intensified in late 2025. These bots, driven by AI training and agentic scraping, put immense strain on the site's aging infrastructure, with 90% of traffic reportedly being non-human by early 2026.

While the initial cause was believed to be sheer traffic volume, logs revealed more targeted probing and attempts to access data before publication. A plausible theory links the attack to prediction markets, such as Polymarket, which rely on The Numbers' data for resolving bets. Early access to this data could provide a significant trading advantage. The incident highlights the fragility of web infrastructure against sophisticated AI-driven attacks and the potential for any data-rich website to become a target when it can be monetized through prediction markets.