Hey everyone, grab a coffee because I’ve got a funny (and slightly embarrassing) story to share! It’s all about how I turned our landing page and application into a personal “Hello World” greeting – but not for the world… for our own team.
It was a perfectly normal afternoon until BAM! Our marketing team burst into our Slack like they’d just seen a ghost: “The landing page is down!”
Naturally, I did what any developer does in this situation internally panicked while pretending to stay calm.
Cue the investigation montage:
I dove into the server logs, expecting to find something dramatic, and there it was: a DDOS attack. Someone, somewhere, decided to unleash the fury of a thousand requests per second on our poor, unsuspecting landing page
The server, as you can imagine, was not happy about it and promptly crashed.
Time for Action!
We tried the classic “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” method. Spoiler: didn’t work. The DDOS was still going strong. So, we switched gears and decided to block the incoming IP addresses.
In my ‘urgent superhero mode,’ I pulled all the suspicious IPs from the logs and tossed them into our blocklist like they were confetti at a parade. The attack slowed down. Mission accomplished!
Or so I thought…
The Plot Twist
A few minutes later, I started hearing complaints from the team:
“Uh… I’m only seeing ‘Hello World’ on the website… what’s going on?”
“Wait, why am I being greeted with ‘Hello World’ instead of our homepage?”
The Moment of Realization
My heart dropped. I knew it instantly. It was me. I was the culprit! While hastily blocking IPs like a digital bouncer, I had accidentally blocked our own internal network’s IP too. because some one from our company visited the website during the same period.
And to add some flair to this epic mistake, I had set up a default “Hello World” message to appear whenever an IP was blocked.
I quickly unblocked our internal IP and asked to check them it starts working
I hope this gave you a chuckle! 😅 Stay tuned for more techy blunders and the lessons I (painfully) learn along the way.