1) They were caught with their pants down. Their DDoS playbook was probably either outdated or not full fleshed out. This is somewhat excusable if you're a cont

1) They were caught with their pants down. Their DDoS playbook was probably either outdated or not full fleshed out. This is somewhat excusable if you're a content provider. It's not excusable if you're the cloud/colo/datacenter provider. This is literally your raison d'etre. Cue the "you had one job" memes. 2) Netops people don't get Christmas off (1). Our teams are working all year, all day, every day. Netops isn't HR or marketing. It's not super difficult to arrange a conference call with your transit providers, DDoS mitigators, etc. This is old hat to them. 3) Completely agree. 4) The downtime was a lot worse if you had multiple instances in more datacenters. Or put another way, the bigger the Linode customer you were, the worse it was. (1) I've had a router die every Christmas or New Years for the past 6 years. Never had one die outside those windows. They must angry at me for what I've put them through.