At the time of its public launch, 80legs offered customized web crawling and scraping services.

[1][2] 80legs is built on top of a distributed grid computing network.

80legs has been criticised by numerous site owners for its technology effectively acting as a Distributed Denial of Service attack and not obeying robots.txt.

[5][6][7] As the average webmaster is not aware of the existence of 80legs, blocking access to its crawler can only be done when it is already too late, the server DDoSed, and the guilty party detected after a time-consuming in-depth analysis of the logfiles.

Some rulesets for modsecurity block 80legs from accessing the web server completely, in order to prevent a DDoS.