Remainers accidentally DDoS the British government

With eight days until the UK’s scheduled exit from the European Union, a prime minister who has lost control, a paralysed political system, and Britain reduced to a laughing stock on the world stage as it limps into an entirely avoidable humiliation, the country feels like it’s on the edge of total breakdown.

Indeed, over the past 18 hours, over 750,000 angry Remainers – the sort of people who (for some reason) unaccountably insist on indulgences such as supermarkets with things to buy in them and access to life saving drugs – have signed a last-ditch petition on Parliament’s website to revoke Article 50 and forget about the whole thing.

Unfortunately for them, the unintentional side effect of thousands of people logging onto the same website at once is causing an abnormal spike in traffic to the government’s site, with the effect that the servers that host it are repeatedly crashing, resulting in visitors being served a 502 Bad Gateway error (which means one server has received an invalid response from another one upstream, i.e. it’s offline). In effect, an accidental distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is taking place.

Our sister site WhatIs defines a DDoS attack is one in which multiple compromised computer systems attack a target such as a website and cause a denial of service for users by overwhelming the target with a incoming messages, connection requests or malformed packets, causing it to slow down or crash.

DDoS attacks are more usually associated with bad actors, state sponsored hackers, cybercriminals and so on – the massive Mirai IoT botnet attack in late 2016 was a DDoS attack – but it isn’t unheard of for sudden spikes in legitimate traffic to websites to have a similar effect.

Ruby on Rails expert and Unboxed (the firm behind the petitions website) CTO Andrew White explained on Twitter that the site had gone down because calculating the trending count became too much of a load on the database – Unboxed uses an AWS-hosted relational database service (RDS).

There is one way that you can help if you are signing the petition today, please consider others and resist the temptation to sit there refreshing it, and trust that GDS will have things back up and running in good time.