> This is weird. First, it's very hard to pull off a DDOS attack using Tor. The most you could get would be less than someone repeatedly pressing refresh every second.
Please explain. Why do you think Tor can't provide a user with many RPS?
Please explain. Why do you think Tor can't provide a user with many RPS?
This is why I find OP's story hard to believe, it doesn't add up.
That said, it's not particularly effective a as a brute-force DoS machine due to the limited bandwidth capacity and high pre-existing utilisation. Higher level DoS by calling heavy dynamic pages is still possible.
The parent didn't specify that the outages were during the period that the scraping was coming from Tor. It's equally possible that it only started affecting availability after they blocked Tor and switched to cloud machines.
All that said, screw people who use Tor for this kind of thing. They're ruining a critical internet service for real users.