While working away to ensure people are aware of the meetup on Thursday I noticed first, that surprisingly few people (19) have RSVPed, and that Meetup.com is rather wobbly, in fact what I noticed first was an apology from them about an outage, but it is causing chaos globally.

Looking into it, the CEO sounds rather annoyed:

We were prepared for most DDoS attacks, but the nature of these attacks is changing (example here).

Here’s what happened. On Thursday morning, I received this email:

Date: Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 10:26 AM
Subject: DDoS attack, warning

A competitor asked me to perform a DDoS attack on your website. I can stop the attack for $300 USD. Let me know if you are interested in my offer.

Simultaneously, the attack began, our servers were overwhelmed with traffic, and our services went down.

The denial of service attack certainly appears to be working, and service from Meetup is intermittent, which may explain why the event is still nowhere near full (or alternatively Sam Bowman is not that popular?). Regardless, the planned meetup is to discuss the highly topical issue of minimum wage laws, which is both important for lots of lives and rather emotive. If there is empirical evidence available that proves the libertarian objection, then I want to know all about it – because it matters. This one deserves to sell out, it would be a shame if ignorant criminals spoiled a good event.

Of course, the show will go on, but it seems we will not be able to properly track RSVPs. I want people to know that at the last count meant there are at least 9 physical chairs available to sit on, and that if it ends up being over subscribed then we’ll do what we can to compensate for it (e.g. with bar stools). People who cannot physically RSVP should come along anyway. As I have said before, the capacity issue sometimes looks tricky on paper, but it rarely is.