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On October 28th, 2024, the Scratch site experienced a major outage which caused several important features of Scratch to stop working, such as comments on projects and studios and sharing projects. In addition, many popular high-traffic pages returned 500 errors.[1]

The Scratch Team acknowledged the issue and has resolved it, and implemented security measures to prevent the issue from happening again.[2]

Controversy

During the outage, many Scratchers were outraged,[3][4] and some even claimed the servers were DDoSed.[5] A stickied topic on the issue had over 1,000 replies within a few hours (and is potentially the fastest topic on the forums to reach 1,000 posts), and some were even using it as a chatroom while other common chatrooms like griffpatch's profile page were down.[citation needed] Memes about the outage were also created and posted to the sticky.[6]

Scratch Team Response

The Maintenance Mode page that appeared while the Scratch Team was resolving the issue.

After the Scratch Team became aware of the issue, they posted an update on X (formerly known as Twitter).[2] Later, the issues got so bad and uncontrollable, that the Scratch Team had to temporarily shut down the Discussion Forums, and later the entire website, for around 1 hour. The Discussion Forums were reopened on the 2nd of November.

After the issue was resolved, the Scratch Team lowered the maximum number of students in a class to prevent abuse of teacher accounts.[7]

References

SandCastleIcon.png This section has links to websites or programs outside of Scratch and Wikipedia. Remember to stay safe while using the internet as we cannot guarantee the safety of other websites.
  1. https://ocular.jeffalo.net/topic/786872
  2. a b @scratch. (2024-10-28). "Heads up! We're currently experiencing technical difficulties on http://scratch.mit.edu impacting load times. Our engineers are hard at work finding a fix. We'll share updates as soon as we have them." https://x.com/scratch/status/1850958442686452144
  3. Jigglypuffcupidcute. (28/10/24). "this error is so annoying it's not letting me say "thank you for crediting" to someone" https://ocular.jeffalo.net/post/8208555
  4. Knit_Knotz. (28/10/24). "The site is unusable at the moment, I don’t care if it goes down, I just want it fixed!" https://ocular.jeffalo.net/post/8208621
  5. Gamer_Logan819. (28/10/24). "Some people offsite have done some digging and it is looking like we have been hit with a DDoS attack" https://ocular.jeffalo.net/post/8208783
  6. alboxer2000. (28/10/24). "OH NO OUR WESBITE[sic] IT'S BROKEN" https://ocular.jeffalo.net/post/8209140
  7. topic:799384
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