Why do the instances keep going down? It makes me think that this is not a reliable social network, but the alternatives are not as good.
Distributed denial of service.
That first D is the one that makes the attack a real problem.
Yep, this is key. If you’re getting a bunch of malicious traffic from one source, that’s easily fixed. Just drop the traffic.
But when that traffic is coming from hundreds or thousands of sources, that becomes much harder to address. Can you just drop traffic from those sources? Sure! But then you also risk dropping legitimate traffic.
There are also services that can automate the detection and prevention of DDOS attacks such as CloudFlare and Akamai, but these can get expensive very quickly, so it can significantly increase the cost to running the instance in question.
I honestly forgot what the first D was at that moment lol. While I agree it technically can be done pretty badly without distributed attacks. I read in the past couple of years of an approach attackers used was to make an application DOS itself from a single request. I think it required a vulnerability in the application in this instance though.
