Update on the weekend outage:
Sorry I wasn’t really posting updates here - most of the updates were on Discord the past few days. I can assure you, however, that I was working non-stop through the weekend to do what I could to keep the site online.
Here’s what happened:
I was notified on Saturday morning that the site was down. After some investigation, it became clear that Flowlab was the target of a pretty large global botnet attack.
and at the same time I started receiving ransom requests from scammers that wanted me to send them a ransom in Bitcoin in order to stop the attack.
Obviously paying a ransom was out of the question, so on Saturday I got to work upgrading the backend infrastructure and trying to mitigate the attacks.
I don’t want to go into too many technical details, but here are the general stats from Saturday and Sunday:
Servers Added or Upgraded: 2
Hours of Work on the site: 40
Hours of Sleep: 6
Number of bot requests flooding Flowlab: More than 10 Billion (yes, billion)
Anyway, the attack seems to be over for now, but the security posture will remain elevated for a little while until I am confident that the scammers have gone.
Thanks for everyone being patient while the site was unresponsive, I know the outages were really inconvenient.