Minor incident

figshare.com: Botnet flood

Affected: Website, Search & browse, SSOLogin, Stats API, PALogin

Current status of figshare.com: Operational — live figshare.com status

Timeline

1. Oct 24, 2026, 12:25 UTC
   investigating
   We are currently investigating this issue.
2. Oct 24, 2026, 12:28 UTC
   identified
   The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.
3. Oct 24, 2026, 12:29 UTC
   monitoring
   A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.
4. Oct 24, 2026, 13:54 UTC
   resolved
   This incident has been resolved.
5. Oct 24, 2026, 15:04 UTC
   postmortem
   Resolved: Elevated traffic from automated clients, 24 October 2026 Summary: From about 05:00 UTC on 24 October, [figshare.com](http://figshare.com) received a large volume of automated requests from a distributed network of clients. At its peak, traffic to our site was roughly seven times the overnight level. Impact: Degraded performance across the website \(slowness and intermittent errors\). Response: We identified the traffic pattern and deployed a targeted filtering rule at our web application firewall at about 12:30 UTC. Traffic returned to normal levels within minutes, and we monitored for a further hour to confirm it stayed there. Status: Resolved. Traffic levels have been stable since about 13:00 UTC. Next steps: We are reviewing our traffic filtering to catch similar automated traffic earlier, and we will keep monitoring.

Updates as published by figshare.com (original).