As I tell my kids,

It doesn't matter if you meant to spill the juice or not. It was spilled and needs to be cleaned up. Now, what can be done differently to keep it from happening again.

Weather or not you meant to do activity that can cause a DOS doesn't matter. The fact remains, the remote site saw it as such and responded. Perhaps there is a better way to do the number of queries that you need to do for this task? Maybe an algorithm or protocol that is not as resource intensive on the remote server?

Update: Forgot emphasized part of quote. Brain moving faster than fingers.