Around the holidays, network engineers are the only ones who don't really take time off. The sorts of people who might say "hey, we need to give some clarity to customers" are less available than the people whose time is spent firefighting.
We've had a few false-starts, but we've finally gotten all of our datacenters dropping all traffic to these critical IPs at the edges. This should stop the most serious outages, so it's a big step.
I do feel a certain amount of loyalty to linode, as they've been an excellent service the past few years, and I see them battling to put out these fires.
I'm hoping as linode grows in size they can put in place more sophisticated measures to guard against this - DDoS is a problem everyone faces. Its tough, but when the dust settles, it could be an opportunity to innovate.