This is not a DDOS, Tell the truth SE.

[Fawkes]

SE's servers haven't been going down. Apparently if you use a VPN you can stay connected while everyone else DCs, the server is up the whole time. I've always been able to log right back in, if the server was being DDoSed it would go down and be unavailable for more than a minute. It's some node or something outside of SE's control between you and the server, and even that's not going 'down' it just has the hiccups.

Probably a bunch of AI datacenters sending traffic though that same node, and it can't quite handle the increased load.

[whiskeybravo]

Probably a bunch of AI datacenters sending traffic though that same node, and it can't quite handle the increased load.

That's certainly not an outlandish conclusion

[Jeeqbit]

Probably a bunch of AI datacenters sending traffic though that same node, and it can't quite handle the increased load.

Thing is, I contacted NTT and they didn't mention anything about issues at those nodes, and you would think that they would if asked about them and shown a full network trace to the server. They kept their focus to my query about DDoS and that they have DDoS mitigation services that can be purchased and seemed confident they were actually good. Upon investigation, I saw they had several tiers of DDoS mitigation services, depending on how deep you need to customize the countermeasures.

I've been thinking about it though. If someone sends you TCP ping packets, what can you do? If you rate-limit them to stop the DDoS, you potentially block out players' ping packets.

A lot of games use UDP, which involves having their own customized packet structure including for ping, so they would be more easily able to filter out packets that don't resemble the games' or that don't match the IP/connection ID combo.

So my guess is using TCP just makes it all the more harder to distinguish DDoS traffic from game traffic, making countermeasures a lot harder.

All of which means changes to the server itself could improve the ability for countermeasures to actually be effective. But it would really surprise me if SE ever put in effort like that.