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Now you can argue as much as you want - but the (sad) truth is that mob mentality exists and we will have to deal with it for at least the next few centuries.

This should be a lesson for companies that hire highly confrontational people as their official community representatives.

Yes, in a perfect world there shouldn't be DDOS' and other attacks because of a tweet about an immature joke but it's not a perfect world and we should be very wary what personalities we hire to represent us.

As much as I don't like it - the "right" thing for sengrid would be to replace their 'developer evangelist' with someone who's less confrontational. Yes, it sucks. But as businesses we have to deal with reality.

If she was confrontational she would have confronted them. Replace 'confrontational' with 'passive aggressive' I totally agree.

This smacks of a serves them right attitude. This same attitude is what drives doxxing efforts against individuals that directly threatens their safety.

>As a method of justice it has more in common with a lynch mob than a court of law

You mean like when someone gets personally offended by a comment and instead of resolving it one-on-one turns to her Twitter account to shame and blame the "violators"?

Yeah. Except the person who instigated this set up the lynching in her capacity as a professional, i.e. on her "evangelist" twitter account. The kids DDOSing aren't representing companies or doing business

Agreed, as an evangelist her twitter account represent Sendgrid, as such Sendgrid approve of this message which is baffling to me.

I'm really sad these guys lost their jobs because of these remarks, I don't think the way she handled that is the way we need to move forward.

Sometimes something happens where posts on hacker news are part of the debacle[1] and it results in an influx of new users. I don't want to sound like an old coot, but I'm a bit concerned about the type of user this thing has been attracting

[1] in this case, the guy who was called out for the jokes, posted in a comment on here that he was fired

OK, is there any actual evidence that this is a DDOS of SendGrid? Because their status page indicates nothing of the sort, and all I'm seeing is HN jumping to conclusions.

Adria's blog was already under a DDOS, so it's not a huge stretch to think this is too.

It is a huge stretch- at least partly because there is no third party verification that Adria's blog is actually victim to a DDOS attack, as far as I know. I'm not accusing her of lying, just that "a huge, huge number of people reading your blog post" can look a lot like a DDOS attack if you're running an unoptimised version of Wordpress, or similar.

It's uncharitable of you to assume she can't tell the difference between a botnet and a spike in traffic. The "third-party verification" is that her site came back online after implementing CloudFlare's DDoS mitigation.

It's uncharitable of you to assume she can't tell the difference between a botnet and a spike in traffic.

I don't think so. It's incredibly difficult to tell the difference, given that a DDOS is a huge spike in traffic.

Real users load CSS and images, run javascript, stay on the page more than a second, etc.

Not when they can't load the page, they don't. Once a traffic spike overwhelms the server no-one sees any HTML, downloads CSS or stays on the page.

That is hardly any proof?!

I couldn't agree with you more on the subject of what happened with PyCon. I don't think it should be mixed with what is happening now.

On the flip side, I'm happy that this story has been up-voted and that it attracted some attention because I was able to know that Sendgrid is down (never received any mail notification and I don't follow them on Twitter).

> ... this isn't going to get the guy's job back, and it certainly isn't going to teach anyone a lesson

As much as I don't support the methods, seems like this actually sends a message (right or wrong). So it perfectly works from attacker's perspective.

I'm pretty sure by now every critical person in Sendgrid know the details of what happened, why happened and people involved. Not because of the initial twitter discussions but because this actually costs them money directly.