For the past few hours, lemm.ee has been bombarded with abnormal (almost definitely automated) traffic from a range of different IP addresses. This managed to overwhelm our servers, and we were offline for the past hour or so.
I was in the middle of celebrating my birthday, so response was a bit slow, but I believe we are recovering now, with mitigations in place to try and prevent further issues. Some of you may be inconvenienced by some bot checks when you browse lemm.ee, I am sorry about that, but it's necessary for now.
Sorry for the issues and I hope you have a nice weekend ahead!
We saw a brief similar traffic spike approximately an hour ago, but it dropped off pretty quick. It seemed to focus on our mlmym front end and briefly overloaded our backends for a minute.
All the suspicious ips I've checked so far, are owned by chinese cloud providers (huawei, alibaba, tencent, etc)
I don’t go to this school, but this seems like a particularly strange instance to attack. Were they scrapers? Which is also an incredibly strange thing to do. Spinning up an instance and directly pulling 6 years of content would be far easier.
I read somewhere that the perpetuators are likely getting some practice in before attacking their actual targets. Lemmy instances just happened to be unlucky enough to be among the victims chosen for this rehearsal.
Huh, I hope it wasn't me with my constant Summit (Lemmy client) refreshes (I was having issues with that app so I was doing a lot of API requests I guess) 🤣