That Time I Accidentally DDoS'd My Company
summary
A homegrown Chrome extension polling health-check URL runs a GET every three minutes but the Chrome API actually schedules independent, persistent checks on tab creation, so long-lived browsers with opened 30–1,800 tabs per user multiply traffic. During an AWS security-group API outage, teams remove the SG to restore access and the extension-driven requests from hundreds of laptops turn into a torrent that vaporizes EC2 autoscaled proxy instances. Resolution: dead-end the health endpoint, patch the extension, restore security-group updates.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (9)
- 0:00Accidental DDoS story
- 1:06Proxy and Bouncer setup
- 3:56Chrome extension for checks
- 5:41Scaling during lockdown
- 7:27Sudden DDoS attack
- 8:50Chrome extension caused outage
- 10:34Root cause of overload
- 11:39Fixing and reflecting
- 12:43Lessons learned
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