Planned improvements and support expectations

Over the past months, many of you have experienced periods of slowness and occasional service interruptions on Zenodo. We would like to explain the current situation and outline the steps we are taking to address it.

Increased traffic and automated access

Zenodo traffic has increased significantly, not only from human users but also from automated systems, including bots, harvesters for AI and people using AI. These systems generate a sustained and aggressive load on the platform. Many of these automated systems do not respect our rate limits and actively try to circumvent them, creating additional strain. On average, we now observe around 180 requests per second. At peak times during working hours, this can easily reach 250 requests per second and more. The current Zenodo infrastructure was designed based on the traffic patterns observed during the migration to the next-generation platform, InvenioRDM, in 2023, when the load was lower and more predictable.

This affects both browsing and file transfers, resulting in slower uploads and downloads, as well as occasional unavailability. Basic mitigation techniques such as blocking and rate limiting are no longer sufficient on their own. More advanced traffic management and protection mechanisms are required, together with infrastructure upgrades.

Planned improvements

In the coming weeks, we will progressively upgrade the platform and deploy additional mitigation measures to better handle the increased load and reduce the impact of abusive or malicious traffic. These changes will be rolled out step by step in order to preserve service continuity.

During this period, we kindly ask for your patience. At the moment, support requests related to performance issues or temporary slowness are difficult to address individually, as the root causes are already identified and are being handled at the infrastructure level.

As Zenodo grows, our support team is receiving more support requests than ever. While we work through these requests, the fastest way to find a solution is often through our Help Portal and FAQs. We've designed these resources to give you instant answers to common questions so you can get back to your research without the wait.

We will keep you informed of major developments and improvements as they are deployed.

As always, Zenodo remains committed to its core mission of supporting open science, reserving research outputs, and providing reliable access to research for the global community. Ensuring that research remains open, accessible, and reusable continues to guide our technical and operational decisions.

Thank you for your understanding and for your continued use of Zenodo.