Over the past months, CDS has been experiencing a very high volume of automated traffic originating from all over the world.
These requests, coming from bots, AI crawlers and various scripts, have intermittently impacted the stability and performance of the platform. To put it bluntly, CDS has been unreachable far too often lately, and we are not proud of it. We constantly strive to provide a high-quality and reliable service.
We continuously block aggressive crawlers and, unfortunately, this sometimes affects legitimate users as well.
Because our efforts are concentrated on the migration to the new platform, we aim to minimise the work required for heavy and complex infrastructure changes to CDS.
To ensure CDS remains reliable and responsive, we will however implement a set of infrastructure changes in the coming weeks. Most of these updates will be fully transparent to users.
Mandatory HTTPS
From now on, all HTTP traffic will be automatically redirected to HTTPS. This improves security and helps us better manage incoming traffic.
In principle, this change should be completely transparent. If you experience access issues, please make sure any bookmarks, scripts or integrations use https:// URLs only.
Controlled searches
We have deployed traffic-management measures for the CDS search functionality. Under specific conditions, certain searches may be blocked. Users accessing CDS from the CERN network will not be affected by these limits.
Other improvements to better handle traffic
We will deploy internal infrastructure updates that allow us to better control, filter and limit harmful traffic patterns. These adjustments are not expected to affect normal usage.
If you encounter any problems following these changes, please contact us. We are here to help.