What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all

# [What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all](https://stephenfollows.com/p/what-just-happened-to-thenumberscom-should-worry-us-all)

If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.

Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even Guinness World Records.

And it was this GOAT status which caused the catastrophic events of March this year.

On the 5th March 2026, TheNumbers.com website vanished.

The site was down for over a week, without explanation. A week later, it resurfaced at a fraction of its former size. Gone were the historical charts, the individual movie pages, and even the much-loved Report Builder.

With only a generic “we’re rebuilding, please bear with us” message to go on, the internet responded as it always does - with confusion, anger, and conspiracy theories. One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products.

Three months on, I spoke at length with Bruce Nash, founder and CEO of The Numbers, about what happened. He describes quite an unpleasant and eventful experience:

We got a lot of angry emails from people who are like, 'Where's this page that you used to have and you don't have anymore?'

We got a lot of angry emails from people who are like, 'Where's this page that you used to have and you don't have anymore?'

Within his tale are a number of things that should worry anyone who runs, relies on, or simply appreciates the internet.

On Friday 17 October 1997, mathematician and former IBM software developer Bruce Nash launched a Geocities site that tracked 300 films.

Bruce described the launch in a 20th anniversary essay (which now survives only in the Internet Archive, for reasons that will become clear):

I hit a button in an Access database, uploaded some HTML pages to Geocities, and made a brief announcement on the Hollywood Stock Exchange message boards to let people know that I was starting to analyze box office for films to help them pick MovieStocks to trade on HSX.

I hit a button in an Access database, uploaded some HTML pages to Geocities, and made a brief announcement on the Hollywood Stock Exchange message boards to let people know that I was starting to analyze box office for films to help them pick MovieStocks to trade on HSX.

From those humble beginnings, Bruce and the team he built around the site turned The Numbers into the film industry's most reliable financial source.

At the start of 2026, the database tracked 78,396 movies, 178,375 theatrical release records, and 236,176 people.

During its lifetime, the challenges The Numbers has faced have changed immensely. For its first quarter century or so, the traffic was manageable and mostly polite. As Bruce puts it:

Pre-AI, we got human traffic, mostly well-behaved search engine crawlers, and a few people crawling the site for personal projects. If someone got too greedy, we could spot them and block them.

Pre-AI, we got human traffic, mostly well-behaved search engine crawlers, and a few people crawling the site for personal projects. If someone got too greedy, we could spot them and block them.

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