Twitter Rival Mastodon Suffers DDoS Attack, Founder Confirms

Twitter rival German micro-blogging platform Mastodon's creator Eugen Rochko has said in a toot that the platform suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

Mastodon has several independently-run servers and one of those, called Mastodon.social, which is run by Rochko, was hit by the DDoS attack.

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Twitter rival German micro-blogging platform Mastodon's creator Eugen Rochko has said in a toot that the platform suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the media has reported. Toot is Mastodon's equivalent of tweet.

Mastodon has several independently-run servers and one of those, called Mastodon.social, which is run by Rochko, was hit by the DDoS attack. 

“The site may not work as expected. We're working on mitigating the attack. Fastly are helping us. If in doubt, check status.mastodon.social for information,” Rochko announced in a toot.

To recall, Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter became a boon for Twitter alternatives late last year and most notably for Mastodon, which is an open-source social networking platform. A number of celebrities had shifted from Twitter and joined Mastodon after Musk's chaotic takeover of Twitter.

According to a previous report by news agency Bloomberg, since Musk’s Twitter takeover on October 27, Mastodon saw nearly 490,000 new users and eventually had monthly active users (MAUs) count of over 1 million, as per CEO Eugen Rochko, who founded the free-to-use platform in 2016. Sure, it was nowhere close to the 238 daily active users of Twitter, but it’s still something to take note of, especially for those users who feel Twitter isn’t the free-speech platform it used to be earlier.

Founded in 2016, Mastodon is a decentralised, open-source platform with thousands of servers running across the world. It was developed by German software developer Eugen Rochko. It has a number of features that are comparable to those of Twitter. It has a 500-character limit on posts, no advertisements, and personalised emojis. According to its founder, the platform saw more than a million active users on a monthly basis and gained nearly 500,000 users after Musk's takeover of Twitter.