Steemit Needs Its Own Mascot of Failure

Github has an angry pink unicorn.

Twitter has the famous fail whale.

Steemit has... nothing.

Not even a professional status page. :(

Don't forget, if Steemit.com goes down again in the future, try using busy.org or chainbb.com. Though the blockchain is distributed, the servers ("full RPC nodes") which interact with the blockchain and provide an API endpoint for websites to use are not well distributed.

@sneak said it's a DDoS attack. A DDoS is a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack. Via Wikipedia:

In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack where the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.[1]

In a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources. This effectively makes it impossible to stop the attack simply by blocking a single source.

A DoS or DDoS attack is analogous to a group of people crowding the entry door or gate to a shop or business, and not letting legitimate parties enter into the shop or business, disrupting normal operations.

These are certainly no fun. There are services that can help mitigate them such as Cloudflare. Also, during an outage like this, it should be fairly simple to update the DNS for steemit.com to point to a static page on a global CDN. That way people at least know Steemit, Inc is aware of the issue and working on it.

It seems we're back up now, and the IPs for Steemit.com have changed.

During the outage:

steemit.com.        59 IN A 54.164.45.228
steemit.com.        59 IN A 54.165.162.8
steemit.com.        59 IN A 34.200.95.128
steemit.com.        59 IN A 34.200.97.71
steemit.com.        59 IN A 34.196.252.62
steemit.com.        59 IN A 34.202.98.91
steemit.com.        59 IN A 52.73.91.40
steemit.com.        59 IN A 54.164.250.243

After the outage:

steemit.com.        59 IN A 52.204.202.47
steemit.com.        59 IN A 52.20.108.115
steemit.com.        59 IN A 34.229.26.131
steemit.com.        59 IN A 34.236.106.200
steemit.com.        59 IN A 34.231.145.134
steemit.com.        59 IN A 34.231.139.15
steemit.com.        59 IN A 34.230.175.154
steemit.com.        59 IN A 50.16.114.93

How long will it be before these IPs are targeted for a DDoS also? I'm a bit frustrated because a 9+ hour outage is a big deal. Having no status page is a big deal. Responses like this from the official Steemit twitter account are less than professional. No updates from @steemitdev and only one update from @sneak (who many may not know is a Steemit dev) 8 hours into the problems.

So yeah, I'm venting here a bit. For over a year, I've been a huge fan of Steemit and defender of Steemit, Inc. I've been called a fanboy (among many other more colorful things) for supporting them. I've never powered down my account because I believe in the future value of this platform and having run my own software as a service for over 10 years now, I understand how hard this stuff is.

I hope the Steemit team responds well to this issue and explains what happened and what steps they took to prevent it from happening again. I also hope they outline their plan for better communication and status updates in the future.

And, most of all, I want our own mascot of failure.

What animal should we use? Leave your ideas in the comments.

---

Luke Stokes is a father, husband, business owner, programmer, and voluntaryist who wants to help create a world we all want to live in. Visit UnderstandingBlockchainFreedom.com

_{I'm a Witness! Please vote for @lukestokes.mhth}