I'm the author of the blog. I don't know. Internally, we were half joking that we were going to get ransom notice, but we never did.

The only thing that sort of correlates with this attack is that before it started, we began rolling out some slightly more aggressive rate limits one by one. This was mostly because anytime any new "company" thinks they're going to catchup with Claude/OpenAI, they scrape us very aggressively (and they're not respectful about it). My guess is that the attackers behind this attack were already probing us (they were) and they thought the window of opportunity might be closing.