Hype Event Protection: Queue-it & Akamai’s joint solution to stop bots at scale

High-demand drops, ticket onsales, and limited-inventory releases draw aggressive bot operators looking to flip products for huge markups. These sales can see bots outnumber genuine customers by 20 to 1 as bots use their massive speed and volume advantages to disrupt a fair, orderly sale and leave loyal customers empty handed.

• Speedy bots outpace detection algorithms: Bots rely on speed to fly through user journeys, giving bot mitigation software limited time and data to detect and block them.
• Blocked bots quickly retool & spin up again: When they are blocked, botters see it immediately, retool, and spin up new bots in their place, continuing a game of whack-a-mole.
• Bots can flood the pre-queue: Bot’s sheer volume can give them an unfair chance of getting a better place in line and bloat the size of the online queue, leading to lower odds and longer waits for loyal shoppers.

Businesses executing high-demand online sales need a solution that can accurately catch bots before they compromise fairness—without giving them a warning to retool and adapt.

Hype Event Protection integrates Queue-it’s traffic control with Akamai Bot Manager’s industry-leading detection to deliver best-in-class bot protection during high-demand sales, drops, and sign-ups. The solution neutralizes the speed and volume advantages that bots otherwise have. Here’s how it works:

1. Before the sale starts

• Queue-it collects early visitors on a pre-queue page with a countdown to the sale start time, protecting the site from sudden surges in bot and genuine traffic.
• Queue-it’s existing bot mitigation tools will block bots from entering the pre-queue based on your configuration. 
  Akamai Bot Manager runs in the pre-queue, where it gets extra time and telemetry to categorize each visitor (Human, Cautious, Strict, Aggressive).
• Akamai categorizes all visitors, but to avoid alerting bots to the fact that they’ve been identified, it does not block them—yet.
  
  

2. When the sale opens

• When the pre-queue countdown hits 00:00, all visitors who arrived on time get randomized and assigned a place in the online queue.
• During this process, all bots identified in the pre-queue phase get mitigated—either blocked outright or allowed to re-join at the end of the queue.
• By the time bots are alerted to the fact that they’ve been blocked, all genuine visitors have already secured their positions at the front of the queue.
  
  

3. During the sale

• The mitigation process is invisible for genuine visitors, who get flowed to your site in a fair order at the rate you choose.
• Any late visitors, including bots if you give them the option to re-join, get added to the back of the line in a first-come, first-served order—ensuring genuine customers who arrived on time get first access to your product
• By delaying mitigation until it’s too late for botters to retool, Hype Event Protection solution slams the door on automated abuse—delivering fairer events, reduced load, and faster access for genuine visitors.

European ticketer gives fans 50x higher chance of getting tickets

One of Europe’s biggest ticketing providers used Hype Event Protection for several onsales in August 2025. In one sale alone, Hype Event Protection: 

• Blocked 2+ million bad bots (98% of total traffic)
• Gave genuine fans a 50x higher chance of getting tickets
• Sold through tickets faster by letting only genuine customers through

Below you can see a timeline of the sale. The pre-queue was open from 10:45-11:00 AM, during which Akamai’s Bot Manager identified “Aggressive” bots.

When the sale started at 11:00 AM and Queue-it randomized all visitors into the online queue, the “Aggressive” bots were mitigated and given the option to re-join at the end of the line.

This ensured the roughly 37,000 genuine fans (about 4% of visitors in the pre-queue) got the first chance to buy tickets.

Many additional bots were blocked by Akamai and Queue-it bot defenses before they event entered the pre-queue, resulting in over 2 million blocked bots during the onsale.

Asian ticketer increases sales by blocking inventory-denial bots

In some cases, malicious bots just try to gunk up the sale and keep real fans from buying.

A Taiwan-based ticketer used Hype Event Protection in view-only mode (without taking mitigation action) and flagged:

• 64% of traffic as clearly bots (“Aggressive”)
• 10% of traffic as clearly genuine (“Human”)

Yet when looking at purchases, the ticketer found humans drove their revenue:

• 2% of purchases made by bots
• 76% of purchases made by genuine visitors

The data suggest these were Denial of Inventory ticket bots, reserving tickets indefinitely while hoping frustrated customers would purchase them on secondary markets at huge markups.

These bots not only frustrate genuine customers, they also stretch out the duration of sales, while muddying key metrics like conversion rate and cart abandonment—harming reputation, business intelligence, and your bottom line. 

Hype Event Protection is a new waiting room type you can set up in the GO Queue-it Platform. To use it, you’ll need:

1. Akamai Bot Manager Premier configured to protect your site
2. Queue-it integrated into your CDN setup (typically via path-based routing)
3. Queue-it Akamai Connector v4+ in place

You can find detailed technical documentation on Queue-it’s support page.
 

Hype Event Protection combines the robust detection capabilities of Akamai Bot Manager with the powerful traffic management capabilities of Queue-it’s virtual waiting room to end the bot whack-a-mole during high-demand, limited-inventory sales.

Hype Event Protection improves the accuracy of bot detection, hides detection until it’s too late to prevent bots from retooling, and uses the control mechanism of the queue to keep bad bots out while delivering fair sales and shorter waits for real customers.

For more information on how you can get started with Hype Event Protection, contact your Customer Success Manager or book a demo with one of our peak traffic experts.