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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/UWUggAh on 2024-11-13 12:44:04+00:00.

Hey, first time here.

Today we have a class about “message broker”, and we have an assignment on the evening class(no teaching, just the assignment). The technical detail was about reading transactions from transaction topic then submit it to submit topic then wait for result from result topic. I finished it early before my classmates. That was when I had an idea to test if it is really a broadcast communication by sending it repeatedly in a while loop (which is kinda stupid I don’t need loops at all). I didn’t push much thought into it, and went ahead and did it. The result was, well, normal. I can see the message I sent. I left it run for no longer than 5 minutes because I went to do something else. After that I tried to prank my friends by sending fake transactions. Then one of my friends show me his screen saying he can’t access it. Then I stopped. BUT it still didn’t work. I figured out that during those 5 minutes I have sent around 60,000 submit request(assuming 5ms for each message), and that the server must be trying to process those request in a queue. I thought with some time it will be back to normal. but… the server takes 1 second to respond to 1 request… that means 16.67 hours…

I was shocked, but I still thought to myself that they will just clear the queue. 15 minutes went by, and it still doesn’t work! My friends suggested me to inform teacher assistants (TAs). I was so nervous, and anxious. My hands were all sweaty and cold. I thought to myself “today I fucked up so bad”. I took my time to be ready, then go to inform TAs with my friends. I didn’t say that I did it though. I asked my friend’s opinion on whether I should say it was because of me, he suggested that I shouldn’t, and I should just inform them. So I said to TAs that “I think there is some kind of DoS attack because…”, then I said with 0 acting skills that the spammer has stopped, because you cannot see the requests being sent in the message broker any more. The TAs were looking at me like “How is this guy so sure?”. Then they complained “Who the f*ck did that! If I know I’d make them drop this subject god dammit” which was really understandable. After going back to my seat I can’t stop sweating. I caused them so much troubles for the TAs, the students in class. I really fucked up. I breathed heavily while my friends said “don’t worry much, mistakes happen”. My heart was beating like crazy. I regretted it so much. Until one of the TAs asked the DoS attacker to contact her personally. I have to admit that it was me. But I cannot put myself to say that after acting like I’m not the culprit. So I contacted her online instead(my profile doesn’t have a picture of me). I tell her every information about what I did. I said sorry, and tried to make an excuse like “it’s accidental” which is quite unreasonable. Even though I have no intention of making the problem this big, I kinda did it to prank my friends too.

At the end the professor announced that there is someone sending a request too much causing message queue to be bottlenecked, and that he will come up with a punishment for the culprit. My friends said he meant there will be a punishment for the next assignment, because he never warned this before, but I think I’m doomed. I feel so ashamed for myself, and I’m so afraid that people are gonna know this and judge me. But maybe I deserve it.

Although I don’t understand is why clearing message queue is so hard. (Maybe the professor in responsible was unavailable for some reason).

I apologize in advance if this is hard to read or is poor English.

TL;DR: I crashed(DoS) university’s assignment server because I was curious, causing people to not be able to do the assignment with a excuse that it’s accidental.

edit 1 - DoS not DDoS