[matt_wulfeck]

It's a huge deal for a linode customer. It's not like your site is DDoS'd and you can't access. You can't access anything on linode when their entire service is DDoS'd.

Part of the reason I think it's news is to shame linode. The likelihood of a DDoS attack bringing down the AWS management console is extremely low (has it ever happened?) Yet attackers have managed to do it multiple times on Linode.

[endijs]

I'm one of those customers (for 8th year already) and for me it's not a big deal. Unless you are one of those high profile customers who needs constant API access, those few minutes of downtime is not a big deal. Not everyone is spinning up and down new instances all the time. Plus - not all attacks result in downtime for them. Sometimes you do not notice at all, sometimes responsiveness will suffer a bit. And as I said - their defenses have become way better than they were a year ago. And it's not really fair to compare Linode to AWS. It would be more interesting to see how would DigitalOcean handle the same amount of attacks. And I doubt DO would handle them any better than Linode.

[oliwarner]

Speaking as a customer, I've never actually seen any direct service downtime as a result of a DDOS. Specific services (usually their web manager) have gone down but that hasn't affected my clients' sites running on my servers.

Obvious scope for improvement —and I've no doubt this is a constant engineering sink— but not being able to commission new nodes through the web interface for a few hours hasn't yet ruined my day.