{
  "id": 15478559,
  "title": "The Outage That Wasn't a DDoS",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/18/the-outage-that-wasnt-a-ddos",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-18T19:42:10.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/daanial/the-outage-that-wasnt-a-ddos-381f"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "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.",
  "summary": "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…",
  "key_points": [
    "Website experienced intermittent downtime",
    "Initial suspicion of DDoS attack",
    "Malformed URLs caused 200 OK responses"
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}