Anilist - Website Performance Issues & API Outages

Over the past few days I've been having issues updating my anime status on my website. Now outages and flakey performance of the Anilist API isn't something new but I logged into to Anilist today to find an announcement from nazo, one of the owners of Anilist.

Over the last 2.5 months, traffic to our public API (i.e., traffic from people using scripts or software not using our website directly) has almost doubled. For example, on Tuesday last week we served ~36 million API requests on top of normal site traffic.

That's a big jump, they seem to be doing what they can to absorb this new level of API traffic. It's sad to see this level of potential abuse towards a free and open API. It's another reason why they're getting rarer to find over the years.