I wonder if the attackers chose Christmas day in order to ensure that there were fewer Linode engineers available to stop the attack.

Dallas is their oldest DC, so they have the most customers there and therefore the most attack surface area at that location. It could just as easily be one of their customers.

Performing such large attacks for 5 days in a row costs thousands dollars to the attackers. It is not something a kid can do from their bedroom. Only a big company can have the budget to pay thousands to perform a 5-day multi Gbps attack against another company. Here it is clear that there is a competitor attacking Linode. A competitor who wants to extort them.

This helped me a bit because most of my clients are on vacation so I haven't received as many emails about sites being down/slow as I normally would've.

Can confirm that the attacks started Friday. We got alarms for some tertiary services we run in their datacenters (multiple geos).

An extortion attempt, I suspect.