Someone Spent Good Bandwidth on Us

Around two or three in the afternoon—I wasn’t keeping close track—this website disappeared. Not a crash, not a misconfiguration: a deliberate takedown. Hundreds of thousands of requests, maybe more, hammering the server until it quit trying to respond. A denial-of-service attack. Someone had decided this site shouldn’t be online today and had enough computing power to make that argument stick for hours.

There’s something uniquely strange about being on the receiving end of a DDoS, because it doesn’t steal anything or destroy anything. It just crowds you out. It’s the internet equivalent of someone standing in your doorway so no one else can get through. Someone woke up that morning, made a decision, and aimed their little arsenal at this particular corner of the web. That requires a specific kind of contempt. We should probably be flattered. The suspect list assembles itself naturally: Christian lobby groups, Scientology, Kanye West still processing his feelings from last night’s VMAs, gay killer viruses from Mars. The usual coalition of enemies.

I have no idea who actually did it, which is honestly the strangest part—the scale of the act combined with the complete opacity of the motive. If anyone reading this knows how to actually defend against this kind of thing—firewalls, rate limiting, whatever the correct answer is—I’m genuinely asking. I’d rather not spend the next one staring at a blank screen wondering which of our enemies finally found the button.