which was caused by our own maintenance several weeks apart (the root cause description is really quite good).
I think the distinction people make implicitly is a 25 minute outage versus 8 hours. DDoS attacks suck, but they're just standard these days. As a customer though, any source of (network) outage usually has the same outcome: "my site is unreachable (and I don't care why)".
The reason we (and AWS and others) offer multiple datacenters/zones within a <1ms boundary (a compute "region") is so you can build a highly available app that can fail over with minimal degredation. For customers that were using App Engine Flexible environment with the regional spreading turned on, only some of their instances were affected, but their apps shouldn't have skipped a beat.
Linode is good at what they do, but any customer in Atlanta just had to wait this entire event out.
Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
But could it simply be severity of the attacks? I keep seeing comments about a 2 week ddos attack last christmas - that's something that i would be shocked to see Google/AWS succumb to. Not that Google/AWS attacks don't happen, i just can't imagine them being down for ~2weeks
(I imagine it was just one datacenter from Linode, not the entire service, fwiw)
One thing that took them so long was that their upstream ISPs at some of the datacenters were themselves unable to handle the DDOS, so they had to switch ISPs, which took a while.
I don't see Google/AWS as easy to attack; but I'm not sure why similar tier players like DigitalOcean aren't being hit -- or maybe they're just less transparent about things, or are actually a smaller target (didn't think they were?).
edit: here's a postmortem from linode of the christmas attack - https://blog.linode.com/2016/01/29/christmas-ddos-retrospect...
Linode has a bunch of great features, but after seeing them get hacked a half dozen times over really silly things, more DDOS's than you would be happy with, and frankly I have had interactions with their management (just online) and was sorry to have had said interactions.
You can also read a bunch of implications from former employees about their management, but you can feel free to discount that given how many times ex-employees are a bit pissed.
- Former Linode Customer