So, the other night, I really REALLY wanted to go onto my DJ buddy Zak’s Soundcloud page and specifically post a comment that this one spot where his newest track breaks out from ambient haze into full-on 4/4 motorik groove was “BUGGINNNNNN!!!!!!!!!” with 10 exclamation points. But when I went to the site, I found that the only thing that was buggin’ was the Soundcloud server! LOL. But seriously, it turned out that the popular sound platform had fallen victim to what our geeky friends at hypebot call a “DDoS attack” (distributed denial-of-service attack), resulting in a service outage that began on Monday. “Fuck,” I thought. “How will Zak ever know that I think that that transition is buggin’?!?!” (I thought of calling him instead, you know? But eh, I really need my kudos to be seen by the rest of the world in order to bother giving them.)
At first, details of the attack were sketchy. “Very sorry for the current downtime,” was all the company could tell its users before noon on monday night. By 8 PM, some parts of the site were back, but others, including its API (that’s “application programming interface,” which is like the stuff that software uses to, you know, do stuff), were still quite pejoratively buggin’. Finally, the next day, Soundcloud confirmed it: “We can confirm that the ongoing service outage that started at 8:40pm last night CET has been a distributed denial-of-service attack.” These DDoS attack things involve “saturating the target machine with external communications requests, so that it can’t handle legitimate traffic,” which then leads to the overloading of that server, followed by the WTF-ing of us users who then cannot use it to escape the harsh reality that our lives are boring and meaningless.
No real word on exactly who was responsible, but as of yesterday, things were starting to slowly improve. “Our attempts at mitigating was successful and we’re now stabilizing,” the company said yesterday. “We might experience some intermittent hiccups, transcoding delays and unavailable players but it looks like we’re on track on getting back to full capacity.” Fittingly enough, Alex, one of the Soundcloud founders, posted an audio message about the incident to his Soundcloud page. Man, look at all those comments! That track must be really buggin’.
• Soundcloud: http://www.soundcloud.com