I'm not really sure why "Linode" and "DDOS" makes the news. It happens regularly. And is nothing to be surprised about. What is new is how they managed to get their systems upgraded to the point where DDOS does not matter anymore. After big blackout (when they were under attack for weeks and even one of their DC's was completely offline for more than a day) their defenses have become way better. Of course - maybe attacks are not so big. I do not know that. It's my 8th year with them. During those years only once (I think) I had downtime because of those DDOS attacks. Not bad at all.

I feel bad for Linode. They've always been a good host (I use Linode, as well as Digital Ocean and others), so I would hate to have to switch away.

It feels off that Linode is being targetted so intensely and one feels bad for them but this can destroy their business.

It will be a pity if the barriers to entry are being constantly raised by the need for more and more mitigation and this will reflect in the level of expertise needed and prices for end consumers, and even then with the constant threat of blackouts.

It also becomes easy to silence inconvenient voices.

It is difficult to run a business or website if you need to constantly fight extortionists or make payoffs to address threats of downtime. Today Linode is in the news, tomorrow it could be anyone else targetted.

There is no easy solution here, without putting constraints somewhere but there must be a way to make the web more resilient and robust and not subject to the whims of extortionists and other malicious agents.

This sort of headline involving Linode is (unfortunately) beginning to feel extremely frequent. I am happy that I've since moved away to GCP, but this is still sad to hear.

Linode customer here. Going to take a tangent.

Way back when, Toyota instituted a policy that required every line worker to effectively stop the factory if a defect was found. Engineers would come to the floor. They were tasked with creating a permanent solution for the problem, one that would have that never happen again.

For the first few months Toyota had a very hard time getting cars out the door. As time went by things got better. Eventually they got to the point where nearly every car coming off the line was perfect.

Around the same time companies like Mercedes Benz were devoting no less than 25% of their factory floor towards fixing manufacturing defects. During this same time period Toyota was devoting less than 5% of their factory floorplan to fixes. This, ironically, meant that the Japanese company was probably delivering a higher quality and more reliable product than the high end car manufacturer.

Source: Read a book on the subject many years ago: "The Machine that changed the world" https://goo.gl/VQw6HS

Back to Linode. The fact that they've seen so many attacks gives them the opportunity to become far better when compared to someone who never sees attacks. Whether they go there or not is entirely in their hands. If this is what's happening they need to take the time to communicate it to the world.

There are at least two possible attitudes: The first is to live in fear of attacks and hope they never happens. The second is to embrace them as an opportunity to get better.

The latter is a formula for disaster, or mediocrity at best. The latter is supported by millions of years of history on this planet showing that things get better because something or someone had to find a solution to a problem.

You can't become a good sailor without facing a few storms.

I'm sticking with Linode.

I appreciate the kind words in many of the comments here, and I'm sure my colleagues do too.

For reference, our third party monitoring measured approximately 23 minutes of downtime–

  1m 46s @ 2016-09-08 01:37:53 EDT
  1m 10s @ 2016-09-08 01:38:14 EDT
  17m 4s @ 2016-09-08 01:40:28 EDT
  2m 11s @ 2016-09-08 01:58:29 EDT

I'd be interested to know which data centres are being attacked. And why just the api and manager?

It cant be a customers of Linode that is being targetted, Linode has seen WAY MORE DDOS attack then any other web host.

Someone must have hated them or a competitor is trying to destroy them.

These frequent attack just isn't normal.

undefined

I wonder if it has to do with people using linode as a way to get around a particular country's censorship.

Out of interest, is there anything to suggest this is an outside attack or an inside attack?

Qui bono? :)

My theory is either a ruthless competitor has been trying to destroy linode for years, this is a distraction to cover a different attack on them, or at some point in the past someone attacked and blackmailed them and Linode paid to make it stop. Once you set that president, it's hard to make it stop.