What websites did Homestuck's Cascade animation crash?

March 16, 2019 2:25 AM

So, I know many of the details on this. I know it took down mspaintadventures.com, Newgrounds, and MegaUpload. I thought I remembered hearing somewhere that Tumblr and LiveJournal crashed too, but I'm not sure of that. What I'd like to know, is exactly what was the fallout from "The Flash that Broke the Internet"?

A while back I had started a project where I make weekly posts about classic Flash animations, and of course, I want to highlight Homestuck on the 10 year anniversary for my post that week. (I'm even breaking my regular Thursday schedule to be sure to hit 4/13.) One of the Flashes I know I'm going to talk about and link to in the post is Cascade (with spoiler warnings of course), but when I do, I want to make sure I get the narrative of this homegrown DDOS attack correct.

posted by radwolf76 to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

The fallout outside fandom? I'd say close to none. I was an active internet nerd at the time, and today's the first I heard of Cascade. It only seemed to take down its hosts, so it wasn't a DDOS on other services like Tumblr and LJ.
posted by scruss at 11:00 AM on March 16, 2019

The MSpaint adventures wiki says:

“Cascade was hosted on Newgrounds and on the release date there was so much traffic to the video that it crashed the site. It proceeded to crash the MSPA Site. It was then posted on Megaupload... and that whole site went down intermittently, as well. ”

You’d think they would add LJ and Tumblr to the brag list if cascade crashed those.
posted by spitbull at 11:19 AM on March 16, 2019