This is my response to “The 12 Days of Crisis,” the dry technical description of an attack on Christmas 2015 that affected multiple American data centers and many thousands of businesses, worldwide.

I love Linode, great company. But this article sidesteps the bigger issue, again. If our highways were attacked on Christmas at this scale, to sabotage holiday shopping, it would be a national emergency, to say the least. Yet, the media completely ignored this. Why the double standard?

Linode acted heroically, good job. But is anyone talking about the intent, the timing, who was responsible, or the government’s role in protecting the country from a digital invasion? Where do you draw the line between “that was annoying” and “act of war” in terms of DDoS throughput?

I understand it’s hard to trace the source of these attacks, and we need technical explanations and solutions, but the larger non-technical media should be talking about this too, even if it’s boring. Because we’re all affected, directly or indirectly.

What if the next attack is much larger, more unpredictable and directed at less-prepared companies? This was not a technical marvel or even about Linode. This was a large-scale attack that intended to disrupt commerce, on Christmas. Seems like a serious problem!