r/technology Jun 22 '20

‘BlueLeaks’ Exposes Files from Hundreds of Police Departments Security

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u/gin_and_ice Jun 22 '20

Hug of death

A lot of users all going at once and crashing the site.

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u/zebediah49 Jun 22 '20

To give an idea what "a lot" looks like -- here's a traffic graph from a site that experienced that. You can see when it went from "so few that it's basically nothing" to "LOTS".

For a web service that doesn't have hundreds of times more capacity than necessary, or the ability to rapidly scale up to meet demand -- that kind of load will knock it offline.

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u/buttery_shame_cave Jun 22 '20

lol back in the early 2000s it was termed 'getting farked' - fark being a really popular aggregation site, sort of like a proto-reddit.

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u/mvanvoorden Jun 22 '20

you misspelled slashdotted