The Outage That Wasn't a DDoS
A presales war story about a website that kept dying while the control panel stayed perfectly healthy — and the two numbers in the logs that nobody had compared. The message came in the same way these messages always do: “The site is down again. Webmail too. We think it’s a DDoS.” Then, a minute later: “But WHM is working fine.” I asked one question: “How many PHP processes is the site allowed to…
A website experienced intermittent downtime while its control panel remained unaffected. The team initially suspected a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, but further investigation revealed a different cause. The issue stemmed from a crawler inadvertently generating malformed URLs, which caused the website to respond with a 200 OK status, leading users to perceive the site as down.
By comparing request counts and analyzing the traffic patterns, it became clear that the problem was not a DDoS attack but rather a single client overloading the server with requests.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.