What is a DDoS attack?

Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, it’s been clear the site has gone downhill, both in terms of its increasingly unhinged content, and the quality of its user experience. Of course, Musk is unable to understand when he is in the wrong, so it makes sense that he blamed last night’s outage during his disastrous interview with Donald Trump on a DDos attack.

DDos attacks are very real things, and have affected all kinds of websites and services, from the mighty Amazon Web Services, to the internet for the entire country of Estonia. So, there is a real chance that Musk might be correct in blaming what happened last night on a DDos attack. However, given that he has famously cut corners and costs at an alarming rate, it’s also just as likely that the software engineers who remain at his company simply don’t have the bandwidth to do their jobs.

But just what is a DDoS attack? And can you stop it from happening? Read on to find out.

What is a DDos attack?

A DDoS (distrubuted denial-of-service) attack is an attempt by a malicious actor to mess with the traffic of a server, service, or network, doing so by swamping the target with a tsunami of internet traffic. Think of someone sending hundreds of cars down a two-lane highway, stopping you from merging into the lane and getting home.

DDoS attacks can be achieved by a number of methods, but the most effective use multiple compromised computer systems to drum up the traffic that will flood the target. These networks of exploited machines can be anywhere in the world, as long as they are online. Usually, the machines have been infected by malware, which is why they can be controlled remotely. In computer terms, these machines are like soldiers in an army, and are referred to as bots or zombies. A large group of them is known as a botnet.

The botnets are instructed to send requests to the IP address of the target, thus overwhelming the server or network and making it crash for anybody else using it. This makes the site suddenly become slow, or even completely unavailable. However, it can be hard to distinguish between a DDoS attack and a genuine flood of traffic, which can happen when a website is mentioned on an aggregator site like Reddit.

It can be hard to avoid DDoS attacks, but there are methods. Some companies constantly monitor threats, whereas others use technologies like caching and rate limiting to ensure they can run, even during times of hard traffic. Whether or not Musk is aware of what these tools are is another matter.