• DDoS attacks: behind the scenes

Hi bunqers,

You might have noticed that we have been working around the clock these last couple of days. If you wonder what kept us busy exactly, make sure to check the following topic: https://together.bunq.com/topic/ddos-attack-status 👍

All bunqers have shared their interest and support for which we're very grateful! We figured it would be nice to give you a sneak peek behind the scenes and provide you with some context on what we have been doing to fight these attacks, that have been persistent 24/7.

You could compare a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack with a traffic jam at the end of a concert; everybody is trying to go on the same street all at once. The attack is clogging up the highway, preventing regular traffic to arrive at its destination. This means that the infrastructure is still there and not broken, however you're having a harder time to get through.

We have filtering in place for when this happens, that should automatically kick in when we face high amounts of traffic. Sunday afternoon this didn't happen for all attacks and on top of that we hit an OS bug. Our DevOps immediately took action to fight the attacks by setting up work-arounds (e.g. switching certain services to different data centres). Meanwhile, our support Guides opened their laptops at their Sunday brunches to keep you informed at all times 💪. DevOps spent the entire Sunday until the early hours working on a structural fix, which will move us to Linux.

Yesterday (20/11) the attacks changed again and we adjusted our filters within the blink of an eye, causing the outages to be only a couple of minutes.

The past days have really shown us once again what it means to be a bunqer. We unite in good times and in bad times and throughout this your support has helped us through the rough patches. Last night we continued until way past midnight to keep an eye on things.

Thanks to your heartwarming shoutouts we are still going strong 🙏. In fact, we're moving services around as this message is posted to make sure your bunq experience is as good as ever!

    Nightowls ftw :)

      Thanks for this clear follow up story. It shows ones again of why I'm proud to be a bunqer! I can only say: keep up the work :) (and hope see meet some of you at the bunq update 6 event )

      If you don't mind, I'm getting back to sleep now :)

        Thanks for clarifying! I still don’t understand why someone want to do this.. Thanks for your work!


        Proud to be a bunq-er!

          Thanks for the compliment John! See you next week. 😄

            Thanks for sharing your insights with fellow bunqers here, Bianca. Much appreciated! And this will still strengthen ties with our bunq bank.

              Thnx for sharing insight information about the attacks. Thanks for the good work!. Together we stay strong!

                Your guys are amazing!!!

                  Nice story!


                  Out of interest: why do you seem to filter the traffic yourself instead of using existing solutions like NaWas or Cloudflare? Is this because of privacy reasons (you don’t want anyone to possibility interfere with your data, although modern encryption takes of of this anyway) or do you have other reasons?


                  Keep up the good work 💪🤘

                    Hey there George 🙋,

                    Thanks for the compliment 🤗!

                    Privacy is indeed very important to us, so keeping privacy at all times is what moves us to filter the traffic ourselves.

                    So similarly to what you stated, if we were to use Cloudfare instead, we would have to store private keys within their servers… and this we want to refrain from doing 👍.

                    Hope this clears that up!

                      Thanks for the clarification Elise! I can indeed imagine you, being a bank, don’t want to share your private keys.


                      Have you considered their Keyless SSL option? To me this should exactly what could help companies like bunq. No sharing of private keys and the biggest and most experienced player in the world in fighting ddos.


                      Doesn’t thát sound like freedom? 😉

                        Already working on something that's is equally good/better. Don't forget we have anti-DDoS hardware. The reason sometimes impact is noticed is for 99% because of the BSD bug we have hit :(.

                          All good, all good, just sharing a suggestion😊.

                          Hope you’ll manage to sort out that bug soon so impact of new attacks will be minimal 😎

                            Still going strong :). We're doing some really amazing stuff behind the scenes. My guestimate is that impact today has been 0 :)...

                              Good work! I wonder though, BSD is by many considered to be superior to Linux in many regards, one of which is stability. I wonder what triggered the "move to Linux" and not the "let's fix this with upstream BSD devs" strategy. Is this one bug really the sole reason? Not saying that Linux is not a good choice but you did start out with BSD, probably also for good reasons.

                                We'll post more about this later, currently working our *sses off keeping everything stable / migrating away. (another night with 4 hours of sleep unfort)

                                  Any updates? Attacks still persisting?

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