Mastodon's flagship server was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack on Monday, causing outages and making parts of the site inaccessible. The company said it implemented a countermeasure around 9:05 a.m. ET to mitigate the attack, but warned that some instability may still be seen.
According to Mastodon, the attack is ongoing and has generated millions of malicious requests consistent with the pattern of a DDoS attack. So far, only mastodon.social has been targeted, but users on other servers were unaffected and continued to access the network as usual.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks aim to overwhelm a website or app's servers by sending massive amounts of junk traffic, causing disruptions but not data theft. This attack is notable because it highlights the benefits of decentralized social networks like Mastodon, where smaller instances can remain online even if one instance is targeted.
Mastodon said its team has deployed countermeasures and access to the site was restored within a couple of hours of the attack's start. The company noted that users on other servers were completely unaffected by the outage, which would have been invisible to them in most cases.
