Not entirely clear to me what is going on, but we’ve seen a large influx in traffic from oversea today. This has lead to high CPU and performance issues.
I’ve put in place a block to what seems to be the source of the traffic, but its not perfect and may cause other issues. If you see/hear of any please let me know here.
For some context, CPU usage jumped when the traffic started… and dropped after the block was applied:
What sort of block if I can ask? blocking AI bots or blocking Russian bots?
The unusual traffic all appeared to be coming from one location on the internet, with the same user agent string. Any traffic from that network will now receive a captcha from Cloudflare. I’m not aware of any lemmy instances hosted there, but will keep an eye on things.
I’m all for captcha use to limit bots and this kind of stuff, which effectively became a DDoS.