[fizzbatter]

I don't follow this too closely, so this is just wild speculation from me:

But could it simply be severity of the attacks? I keep seeing comments about a 2 week ddos attack last christmas - that's something that i would be shocked to see Google/AWS succumb to. Not that Google/AWS attacks don't happen, i just can't imagine them being down for ~2weeks

(I imagine it was just one datacenter from Linode, not the entire service, fwiw)

[warbiscuit]

They weren't down for the entire two weeks, but various datacenters went up and down for hours, then quieted down for a few days, then was back again, then another hit; stretching across two weeks.

One thing that took them so long was that their upstream ISPs at some of the datacenters were themselves unable to handle the DDOS, so they had to switch ISPs, which took a while.

I don't see Google/AWS as easy to attack; but I'm not sure why similar tier players like DigitalOcean aren't being hit -- or maybe they're just less transparent about things, or are actually a smaller target (didn't think they were?).

edit: here's a postmortem from linode of the christmas attack - https://blog.linode.com/2016/01/29/christmas-ddos-retrospect...