I'll provide more details in a full writeup later.
We suffered a DDOS. The volume of traffic was sufficient to keep us from handling it in Arc like we always have before. Simply accepting and dropping all requests not from our office required 45% CPU utilization.
Now nginx is helping with some of the work. Ironically the transition was planned for today anyway, except it was meant to happen at night with no downtime. So it goes.
I'm fixing things as I find they're broken. Please let me know if I've missed anything.
Edit: Yes, I know about and will fix all the SSL resources. Like yours, my Chrome window was also a portal to the '90s for a bit.
Edit Again: Your SSL resources should now be happy. Let me know if I missed any.
A site could, because of its own deficiencies in handling normal traffic, call any outage a "DDOS attack". Not saying this is the case with HN, but see what I mean.
Could you at least specify, is this a massive scrape, which would indicate an attempt to pirate or steal information, or a SYN flood type attack (not a ton of GETs) which would indicate an attempt to not steal information but disable the site.
I believe some more insight into what is happening with all these major site attacks will help us to protect our own sites better. Thx,