I know this isn’t the kind of news Linux fans were hoping to read on Christmas Day, but unfortunately, on a day meant for faith, kindness, and hope, others are choosing to act in exactly the opposite way.
Many of you probably remember the problems Arch faced just a few months ago due to massive DDoS attacks, which mainly affected the AUR. Sadly, just when it seemed those issues were behind, a new large-scale DDoS attack on Christmas Day once again made the distribution’s website effectively inaccessible.
It’s common practice to “blackhole” targets of DDoS attacks as a defensive measure. Blackholing means that packets coming into the network for a specific IP get discarded which lowers the stress on the network and especially on the receiving server. The server will work as if there was no attack but will only be accessible on non blackholed IPs. This would of course require the IPv6 to not get attacked either.
I’m guessing that’s what’s happening here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_(networking)