OpenAI's web crawler has caused a seven-person e-commerce company, Triplegangers, to experience a severe disruption akin to a DDoS attack. The bot reportedly sent tens of thousands of requests to the company's website, overwhelming its server and leading to a crash. The incident has drawn attention to the implications of aggressive web scraping practices, particularly as Triplegangers' robots.txt file was not properly configured to prevent such actions. The CEO of Triplegangers described the situation as being 'basically a DDoS attack' due to the intense scraping activity. This event highlights the challenges small businesses face when confronted with the capabilities of large AI entities.