Mastodon says its flagship server was hit by a DDoS attack

Mastodon's flagship server experienced a DDoS attack that caused temporary outages, following similar attacks on competitor Bluesky, highlighting the growing threat of sophisticated distributed attacks targeting social media infrastructure. The incident demonstrated both the vulnerability of centralized services and the resilience of decentralized architectures—only mastodon.social was affected while users on federated instances remained operational. This pattern of attacks against alternative social platforms suggests IT organizations should reassess DDoS protection strategies, particularly for services running federated or decentralized architectures.