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neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:") wrote:
Apologies for the slowness and timeouts with social.lol earlier. I'm still sifting through log files, but here's what happened:
Between 18:55–19:18 UTC, the server saw a massive spike in traffic and overall load. Traffic jumped from our normal baseline of ~1,500 requests/min to ~10,000 requests/min. During that time, 75% of all requests bore the User-Agent string "Lightpanda/1.0". Lightpanda is a headless browser engine commonly used by AI agents and other automation.
What makes this especially annoying was that these requests were spread over 38,341 distinct IP addresses. This effectively behaved like a DDoS, though it's impossible to say whether that was the goal (or if scraping was the goal). In any case, the sheer volume of unique IPs meant that the actor was able to circumvent Mastodon's usual rate limits and negatively impact the broader server performance.