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I'm working on a small Airtable automation to track monthly utility expenses by pulling data from a regional electricity provider’s site — the fesco online bill system. The challenge is that the site often loads slowly or becomes unresponsive, especially in the evenings.

Has anyone dealt with similar issues when pulling data from sites that don’t have public APIs and aren't always stable? I’ve tried simple fetch scripts and automation tools, but they tend to fail unpredictably.

Would appreciate suggestions on how to handle unreliable external sources in automations, or even alternative approaches like manual syncing that aren’t too time-consuming.

Thanks in advance!

Sorry, I don’t really have an answer for you, but you might be able to use a web scraping service such as Simplescraper or Apify, and then automate the entire process of bringing that data into Airtable with Make’s automations & integrations. If the automation fails, you could have it pickup again later (on a schedule).

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Hey ​@george_fang126 are you making API calls, or getting data our of the html directly?

 

Depending on whether you need login, captha, or others, this could be easily done using an Http Request module/node in Make or n8n. 
 

I’d love to help. Please feel free to reach out. 
 

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

I think you’ve already got the fetching logic in place, you just want to make it more reliable—without adding any extra tools.

The simplest way I can think of is to start by adding a single-select field called Fetch Status, with options like Pending, Success, and Failed.

Each time your logic runs, it should update the status based on the result—if it works, set it to Success, and if it fails, mark it as Failed.

Then set up a scheduled automation in Airtable to run every few hours. That automation should look for records marked Failed, rerun your logic on them, and update the status again afterward.

Over time, this means that even if the site is slow or unresponsive, Airtable will quietly keep retrying until it finally fetches the bill. This approach won’t require any third-party tools.

Taha, airtableadvisor

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