System Crash

[writerkit]

I know it was almost certainly extremely stressful for everyone involved, but the fact that Magnus Archives fandom is numerous and eager enough to completely break Patreon in a manner similar to a DDOS attack just *amuses* me, as does the comment from the producer on Twitter about "due to... voracity the Magnus fandom now technically counts as a DDOS attack."

And this is just the subset of fandom that has paid for early access! The season opener doesn't drop for the rest of us until tomorrow! (I'm quite looking forward to it, although this *is* the same Lovcraftian horror podcast that felt the need to include with the trailer a disclaimer about having written and produced it *before* the pandemic happened, a fact which was much commented-on on Twitter, in the vein of "You know the world is awful when the *Lovecraftian horror podcast* feels the need to state they weren't based on actual events".)

Comments

[jducoeur]

Pointer? I confess, I'm a bit skeptical, but don't know the details...

[writerkit]

His twitter announcements are here: https://twitter.com/AlexanderNewall/status/1245368270053662720

And here: https://twitter.com/AlexanderNewall/status/1245368941972783104

Later on he goes on to note that they've contacted their other distribution platforms to make advanced preparation for increased load upon the wider release.

[jducoeur]

Hmm -- I do see a brief blip in the data, although I'd have to know a lot more about how it correlates to have any guesses whether this campaign was behind it. It's possible, but I *suspect* over-interpreting from overly specific data. 3000 followers is a lot, but it's not *that* many in the grand scheme of things.

Depending on how Patreon is designed, I could totally believe that that many people hitting a single campaign all at once might cause crowding issues for that *campaign* (that's explicitly true of Querki in some respects, although it's desired to handle a lot of certain kinds of load). It's a bit disappointing if that caused wider problems across Patreon -- that would indicate that they need to work on their architecture. Hard to know, based on the public information.

[writerkit]

Well, it's also known that Patreon *did* go down for everyone at around that time, if you look at Patreon's Twitter account: https://twitter.com/PatreonSupport

Which may or may not be a coincidence.

[jducoeur]

Actually, that's not obvious from the messaging -- they reported "intermittent site issues", which is a far cry from "down for everyone". So the question is, how widespread was that?

It wouldn't be surprising at all if many or all of those reports were coming from followers of this specific campaign, who were irate. It's also quite plausible that other campaigns were running off the same server or cluster and hit issues -- that would be unfortunate but not astonishing. (At the moment, Querki is susceptible to similar effects.)

But "down for everyone" is quite another thing. So far, I haven't seen that that happened, although it's possible...