We were down between around 7PM and 8PM PT today. Sorry about that.
It’s hard to tell whether we got DDosd or someone just wanted to crawl us extremely aggressively, but we’ve had at least a few hundred IP addresses and random user agents request a lot of quite absurd pages, in a way that was clearly designed to avoid bot-detection and block methods.
I wish we were more robust to this kind of thing, and I’ll be monitoring things tonight to prevent it from happening again, but it would be a whole project to make us fully robust to attacks of this kind. I hope it was a one-off occurence, but also, I think we can figure out how to make it so we are robust to repeated DDos attacks, if that is the world we live in, though I do think it would mean strapping in for a few days of spotty reliability while we figure out how to do that.
Sorry again, and boo for the people doing this. It’s one of the reasons why running a site like LessWrong is harder than it should be.
Sorry for the downtime, looks like we got DDosd
We were down between around 7PM and 8PM PT today. Sorry about that.
It’s hard to tell whether we got DDosd or someone just wanted to crawl us extremely aggressively, but we’ve had at least a few hundred IP addresses and random user agents request a lot of quite absurd pages, in a way that was clearly designed to avoid bot-detection and block methods.
I wish we were more robust to this kind of thing, and I’ll be monitoring things tonight to prevent it from happening again, but it would be a whole project to make us fully robust to attacks of this kind. I hope it was a one-off occurence, but also, I think we can figure out how to make it so we are robust to repeated DDos attacks, if that is the world we live in, though I do think it would mean strapping in for a few days of spotty reliability while we figure out how to do that.
Sorry again, and boo for the people doing this. It’s one of the reasons why running a site like LessWrong is harder than it should be.