Bots are destroying one of Britain’s last great institutions: Our queues!
British people famously love to queue, no matter the occasion. Traditionally, this has looked like a long line, such as the Wimbledon tennis queue, or even stampedes, like with the recent Swatch watch disaster.
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Today, most Brits are used to queuing online, whether that’s waiting for hours for the possibility of an Oasis reunion ticket, a trip to Glastonbury or even eating at a restaurant, as customers now join a virtual queue rather than wait outside for an available table.
At the same time, the internet is seeing a rapid increase in automated activity. In Q2 2026 DataDome processed a 45% increase in AI agent requests across its network, bringing the total to over 17 billion requests. Not all AI agents are malicious, but the same technology that allows agents to act on behalf of users can also be used to automate queue entry, monitor availability, and attempt purchases at scale.
As Brits move their queuing online, these bots are increasingly entering virtual waiting rooms, sometimes legitimately and sometimes to gain an unfair advantage. Virtual waiting rooms are intended to recreate the fairness of a physical queue, but many organisations can’t tell the difference between genuine customers and sophisticated bots. This needs to be fixed, before the bots – which are now becoming even more skilled thanks to AI – stop British people from enjoying a long-favoured pastime.
Bots are overwhelming virtual waiting rooms, making it increasingly difficult for businesses to distinguish genuine customers from unauthorised automated traffic. A queue of 10,000 humans behaves very differently to a queue of 7,000 humans and 3,000 bots, and many websites aren’t prepared to mitigate the consequences. These bots are not only competing directly with human customers, they are also causing genuine customers to be misclassified as bots and making online queuing increasingly unsustainable.
They do this by taking places ahead of legitimate customers, reserving scarce products or tickets, and overwhelming waiting-room infrastructure. Essentially, bots claim places in the queue and tie up resources with sessions that are unlikely to result in a purchase.
This creates significant challenges for queue operators, ticket sellers, and e-commerce vendors, all of whom want to prioritise legitimate buyers but may not fully understand the complexity of identifying and blocking bots on platforms that were never designed to handle this level of automated traffic.
Most virtual waiting rooms check a user just one time, at the first moment they request entry. Websites might run a CAPTCHA or look at the IP address, but once signals pass a threshold, the visitor will be admitted. And once they’re inside, they’re trusted. This is where the traditional model breaks down.
Sophisticated bots are now mimicking human behaviour, with realistic mouse movements, plausible session patterns and residential IP addresses. They’ve been designed specifically to pass entry checks, and now they’re in the queue with everyone else. Legacy systems weren’t designed with the mechanisms to detect and respond to activity once a visitor is inside the waiting room, and once the bot has cleared the perimeter, the damage is already taking place.
Businesses have a responsibility to protect the buyers on their sites and restore fairness to online queues. The solution can be built around three key steps. Firstly, they need to evolve beyond traditional bot detection methods and validate throughout the visitor’s entire session, not just at the first request. This requires continuously evaluating activity after a visitor has entered the waiting room.
Second, businesses need to establish a trust framework for agents, supported by granular policies. In the age of AI, this might look like allowing agents to act on behalf of verified customers, throttling research agents that provide minimal value and blocking unauthorised scrapers entirely.
Finally, businesses should ensure that their queues remain reliable and under their control by choosing solutions that integrate with their existing systems, provide clear visibility and policy control, and can scale reliably during periods of peak demand.
Online queues were created to make high-demand digital experiences fairer. But unless businesses can distinguish genuine customers from automated traffic, virtual waiting rooms risk rewarding those able to deploy the most bots, rather than those who arrived first.
As AI agents become more capable, businesses need to act now to restore trust in online queues and ensure that every legitimate customer has a fair chance of being served.
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Benjamin Barrier is the Co-Founder & CSO, DataDome