We've been hit by a massive DDoS attack. The site may not work as expected. We're working on mitigating the attack. Fastly are helping us. If in doubt, check status.mastodon.social for information.
@FirefighterGeek@Gargron I have a secondary account. Just in case. I update followers once a month. They are totally unrelated so that gives me access even if my instance is down.
@cautionarytale@Gargron They fear what they are unable to control. Since Mastodon is decentralized and not owned by any corpos, it's difficult if not impossible to contain.
@ablackcatstail this is true, a huge number of intellectually gifted people gathered here per chance, in what could be a public globalization effort. This place enables alternatives for everyone with its diversity, and purpose.
@Gargron This sucks, truly, and yet also shows how incredible decentralized infrastructure is for a platform.
(This is an example of something I'd quote-toot, and I'm still not sure how that is "properly" done... I didn't screenshot because I know the concept is offensive to you personally. Anyway, as to the original toot, thanks for making a platform so open and resilient.)
@lostgen Actually other instances have reported higher load too.
Check the stats at https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/list : mastodon.social has 13 % of total users active in the last month, vs. e.g. 40 % in troet.cafe. So it stands to reason that returning users might create bigger swings in one case than in the other.
However I have no information to doubt Gargron's assessment on the source of today's downtime.
Everything is back to normal now. Yes, it was an attack, not legitimate traffic. No, we don't know who was behind it. I agree the timing with Twitter being down was unfortunate.
Fastly and Datadog who both sponsor us by providing us a free service were instrumental in analyzing and mitigating the attack. Shout out to our own team as well, glad I don't have to do this alone anymore!
@Gargron I know the team is busy, but could you please prioritize requests for adds/changes to instances on https://joinmastodon.org/servers? Not waiting on anything myself, but have seen several other #MastoAdmin reporting a lack of any response. During these Twitter and mastodon.social outages, it would be very helpful to have more places for users to land.
@null@Gargron Want to add I submitted a request to be added a month ago with no response.
I'm in no rush, but at the same time I've spent a fair bit of time tightening the infrastructure so it's up for the job, so it would be cool to be added :)
@Gargron so then the ddos attack on mastodon.social has nothing to do with stoners.social being down? bc that instance is still down and we were given no heads up. im rebuilding from scratch over here.
@Gargron I'm getting 403 errors trying to access the site - am I blocked then? I didn't do anything apart from try to load my timeline while you were down!
@Gargron was this related to all the weird Twitter Toots I wasnt following showing up on my dash? I was trying to check if I accidentally followed the hashtag
@Gargron must’ve been some petulant billionaire unhappy that he’s enshittified what he took from others and that he can’t control the narrative. Wonder who that might be ..