August 27 TCRF DDoS Attack Postmortem

On August 27, The Cutting Room Floor experienced a major DDoS attack that overwhelmed its server's network connection with garbage traffic, forcing Linode to null-route the server's connection to protect their other customers. The attack likely stemmed from a Twitter controversy involving a user who was banned for accessing the site with a Claude AI user agent and subsequently spread false claims about the incident online. Unlike typical bot-based attacks, this assault targeted network saturation rather than CPU exhaustion, making standard mitigation tools ineffective and requiring significantly greater bandwidth capacity to defend against.