Mastodon flagship server hit by DDoS attack causing outages
Original: Mastodon says its flagship server was hit by a DDoS attack
Why This Matters
Shows vulnerability of decentralized social networks to coordinated cyberattacks
Mastodon's main mastodon.social server suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack on Monday morning, rendering the instance largely inaccessible with error messages. The company implemented countermeasures by 9:05 AM ET and restored access, though some instability continues as the attack remains ongoing.
Mastodon's flagship mastodon.social server was targeted by a DDoS attack on Monday, causing widespread outages and error messages for users. The attack began early Monday morning, with Mastodon acknowledging the investigation around 7 AM ET. By 9:05 AM ET, the company successfully implemented countermeasures and restored site accessibility, though warned of continued instability as the attack persists. The incident follows a similar multi-day DDoS attack on rival decentralized platform Bluesky, which was resolved on April 17. Unlike centralized platforms, the attack only affected Mastodon's main server while smaller instances in the network remained operational. DDoS attacks flood servers with massive junk traffic to knock services offline, and have grown exponentially more powerful, with Cloudflare reporting a record 29.7 terabits per second attack last year.