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Please expand this article or section. You can help by adding more information if you are an editor. More information might be found in a section of the talk page. (May 2025) |
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 a distributed denial-of-service attack had been initiated by an attacker.[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 were down.[citation needed] Memes about the outage were also created and posted to the sticky.[6]
The issue was pinpointed to a hacked teacher account that was used to create tens of thousands of classes and students in less than a day. The account has since been deleted.
Scratch Team Response
After the Scratch Team became aware of the issue, they posted an update on X (formerly known as Twitter).[2] Later, the issues were severe enough that the Scratch Team 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 similar abuse of teacher accounts to the teacher account that may have caused the incident. This has caused complaints from real teachers.[7]
References
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- ↑ https://ocular.jeffalo.net/topic/786872
- ↑ 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
- ↑ 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
- ↑ 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
- ↑ 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
- ↑ alboxer2000. (28/10/24). "OH NO OUR WESBITE[sic] IT'S BROKEN" https://ocular.jeffalo.net/post/8209140
- ↑ topic:799384
