glupsWhat actually happens in a DDOS attack?
https://piefed.social/c/nostupidquestions/p/1728085/what-actually-happens-in-a-ddos-attack
DDOS is a symptom. A DDOS can cause different failure scenarios at different points.
Maybe the attack is causing the service to access a backend database that isn’t equipped to handle the traffic. The web server queues requests but they can’t be handled in a timely manner.
Maybe the attack causes a firewall to spend too much time inspecting the traffic by sending a malformed packet.
Maybe the attack simply overwhelms the bandwidth of the firewall or router. The Reddit “hug of death” is a common example.
In short, lots of things can lead to a service interruption. A DDOS is just a description of a way to cause that interruption by using distributed source hosts.
The Reddit hug of death is when someone posts a link in a big community and thousands of people visit it, generating so much traffic at once that, while legitimate, ends up having the same effect as an actual attack does of overloading a website and causing it to become unavailable. Has nothing to do with the Reddit app being hot garbage.