15 minute partial API outage due apparent DOS

For about 15 minutes (8:13 am – 8:27 am PDT), our API was flooded with traffic due to hundreds of thousands of email attempts from 4 IP addresses. Nearly all emails were received, but HTTP requests for the API and UI frequently timed out. We do not know the percentage of requests that timed out, but it was quite high. The API is load balanced and only one API was timing out frequently.

We blocked the bad IPs immediately upon seeing traffic logs (~8:19), but because our custom IP blocking service relies on the API to fetch the blacklist, and the API was not fully responsive to HTTP on one leg, it took a while for the changes to propagate to all five inbound SMTP servers.