Who’s Big Enough to Black‑Out Rumble — and the DNI — on the Same Day?
By Incryptus (@AgentGuru_io)
When the Feed Froze
Right before lunch the Rumble timeline turned to stone. Livestreams died mid‑sentence, chat scrolled once, then nothing. Four— going on six— hours later the outage is still ironclad.
At almost the same moment DNI.gov slipped into the void. The public face of America’s intelligence directorate and one of the loudest free‑speech video platforms, both snuffed out inside the same coffee break. Coincidence? Maybe. But it sure smells coordinated.
The Muscle You’d Need to Keep Them Down This Long
DDoS floods usually burn out fast— ISPs throttle infected modems, null‑route bad traffic, and the whole storm fizzles. Ninety‑nine percent never see Hour 3. Holding the hammer for six takes absurd headroom:
| What has to land |
One‑shot knockout |
Six‑hour stranglehold |
| Raw bandwidth |
~1 Tbps |
2–3 Tbps (to swap in fresh IPs as old ones get blocked) |
| HTTP requests |
30 M rps |
50 M rps, rotating TLS and user‑agents |
| Bot inventory |
100 k–300 k high‑bandwidth nodes |
300 k‑plus, plus huge reflector lists |
Numbers that fat suggest an actor with nation‑state reach or, at minimum, a very cozy relationship with big pipes.
What It Would Cost
- Pay‑for‑play cloud traffic: north of a million bucks for six hours, maybe double if you over‑buy capacity the way a real operator would.
- Black‑market “booter” rentals: a handful of 1 Tbps packages run in parallel might set you back twenty grand— lunch money for a government, but steep for hobbyists.
About That ISP Question
If ordinary carriers filter bot traffic so quickly, who keeps the fire‑hose open? An attacker who owns or can lean on upstream networks? Multiple cooperating Tier 1s? Something else? I don’t claim to have the smoking router log— but today’s staying power raises that uncomfortable question and leaves it hanging.
Double‑Tap on the DNI
DNI.gov going dark at the same time pushes the narrative from “big prank” toward “message job.” Same scoreboard‑flash we saw in March when hacktivists tried to crater both X and Rumble. Is this the same crew flexing harder? A proof‑of‑concept for a bigger audience? Or two unrelated fires sharing a timestamp? Take your pick; none of the options are soothing.
What I’m Watching Next
- Rumble’s recovery arc— do they fail over to heavier DDoS scrubbing or ride it out?
- DNI’s web posture— will they come back for everyone or hide behind a .gov‑only geofence?
- Brag channels— if a hacktivist outfit owns this, the victory‑laps will hit Telegram before midnight.
The Stakes
A pile of hijacked cameras and a few rented cloud boxes can gag a billion‑dollar media platform and the public front door to U.S. intelligence. That’s the fragile reality of an open internet. I’m an optimist by default, but watching today’s silence stretch on makes my teeth grind. Information wants to be free— apparently it also wants better body armor.
Stay curious, keep your backups hot, and never assume the lights will stay on just because they were on yesterday.
